AMD have updated their CVE page for vulnerabilities impacting  Ryzen CPUs a few weeks ago, as pointed out by by Zecoxao. Two new vulnerabilities have been added to the page, late March.

What are AMD Vulnerabilities and why does the PS5 Scene care?

Bugs in AMD Ryzen CPUs, its Secure Processor (SP), or System Management Unit (SMU) could lead to critical, difficult to patch vulnerabilities for the systems using these CPUs. This is interesting for the PS5 scene because the PS5 APU is a semi-custom processor by AMD, which is known to be based on the Zen 2 architecture. As such, vulnerabilities on AMD’s Ryzen series are likely to impact the PS5 as well.

A Critical, and exploitable bug on such a processor could help hardware hackers to hijack the console at startup, and potentially dump critical information from the PS5, for future hacking. As demonstrated by the Nintendo Switch hack, hardware hacks can be very powerful, and extremely hard to patch for console manufacturers.

Which AMD vulnerabilities were added in 2023?

Two vulnerabilities were added to the list in the past few weeks, specifically:

CVE-2023-20558 (Severity: High)

Insufficient control flow management in AmdCpmOemSmm may allow a privileged attacker to tamper with the SMM handler potentially leading to an escalation of privileges.

CVE-2023-20559 (Severity: High)

Insufficient control flow management in AmdCpmGpioInitSmm may allow a privileged attacker to tamper with the SMM handler potentially leading to escalation of privileges.

From Wikipedia:

SMM [System Management Mode] is a special-purpose operating mode provided for handling system-wide functions like power management, system hardware control, or proprietary OEM designed code. It is intended for use only by system firmware (BIOS or UEFI), not by applications software or general-purpose systems software. The main benefit of SMM is that it offers a distinct and easily isolated processor environment that operates transparently to the operating system or executive and software applications.

High Severity bugs like this one are “good” news for hackers who might be able to leverage them, possibly combining them with former discovered vulnerabilities. Of course, for your regular use, and in particular on your PC, if you use AMD CPUs, it is recommended that you keep your BIOS up to date, as some BIOS updates will have patches for these bugs. It is also possible that future PS5 Firmware updates will have such patches

Source: Via Zecoxao