New vulnerability in AMD Ryzen CPUs could seriously jeopardize performance TechRadar Skip to main content TechRadar is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here's why you can trust us. New vulnerability in AMD Ryzen CPUs could seriously jeopardize performance By Sead Fadilpašić published 11 August 2022 SQUIP games: A serious AMD Ryzen flaw can only be fixed by slowing the CPU down (Image credit: Shutterstock) Audio player loading… All of AMD's (opens in new tab) Zen CPUs are vulnerable to a medium-severity flaw which can allow threat actors to run side-channel attacks and reveal 4096-bit RSA keys with relative ease, experts have warned. The flaw, discovered by multiple cybersecurity researchers from technology universities in Graz, and Georgia, was described in a paper titled "SQUIP: Exploiting the Scheduler Queue Contention Side Channel," and later confirmed by AMD itself. "An attacker running on the same host and CPU core as you, could spy on which types of instructions you are executing due to the split-scheduler design on AMD CPUs," one of the authors explained. "Apple's M1 (probably also M2) follows the same design but is not affected yet as they haven't introduced SMT in their CPUs yet." Solution in compromise SMT is short for "simultaneous multithreading" - a technique that improves the efficiency of superscalar CPUs with hardware multithreading, allowing multiple independent threads of execution, using the chip's resources more efficiently. The flaw stems from the way the CPU operates - it's able to execute more lines of code on a single CPU core, in order to boost its performance. But that also allows potential threat actors to monitor these instructions, if they can get malware installed on the device. But almost every malware can be neutralized with a software patch, and this one is no different. It comes with a major caveat, though. So in order to mitigate the vulnerability, SMT technology needs to be disabled, and that means a significant blow to the chip's performance. Read more> Intel and AMD chips have another serious security flaw to worry about (opens in new tab) > AMD and Intel chips are at risk from another major vulnerability (opens in new tab) > Get ultimate device protection with the very best antivirus (opens in new tab) Apparently, all Ryzen processors running Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3 microarchitectures, are affected. AMD confirmed the problem and has dubbed it AMD-SB-1039: Execution unit Scheduler Contention Side-Channel Vulnerability on AMD Processors. "AMD recommends software developers employ existing best practices including constant-time algorithms and avoiding secret-dependent control flows where appropriate to help mitigate this potential vulnerability," AMD's instructions state. TechRadar Pro has asked AMD for a comment and will update the article when we hear back.Here's our rundown of the best endpoint protection (opens in new tab) services right now Via: Tom's Hardware (opens in new tab) Sead Fadilpašić Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he's written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He's also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications. See more Computing news Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to theTechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Thank you for signing up to TechRadar. You will receive a verification email shortly. There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again. MOST POPULARMOST SHARED1Samsung's smaller micro-LED 4K TV might finally be on the way to battle OLED2PC gamers are shunning high-end GPUs – spelling trouble for the Nvidia RTX 40903A whole new breed of SSDs is about to break through4New Anker wireless earbuds offer a feature AirPods Pro can't – and for cheaper5Beg all you want - these beer game devs will not break the laws of physics for you 1Con le RTX 4000 ho capito che Nvidia ha perso la testa2Canon's next mirrorless camera could be too cheap for its own good3PC gamers are shunning high-end GPUs – spelling trouble for the Nvidia RTX 40904IT pros suffer from serious misconceptions about Microsoft 365 security5A whole new breed of SSDs is about to break through Technology Magazines (opens in new tab)● (opens in new tab)The best tech tutorials and in-depth reviewsFrom$12.99 (opens in new tab)View (opens in new tab) Other versions of this page are available with specific content for the following regions:Suomi