If you haven’t updated your Radeon drivers in a while (or rolled back to an older version), now would be a good time to do so. Cisco Talos has uncovered multiple vulnerabilities affecting AMD graphics cards.
The vulnerabilities allow an attacker to “cause a denial-of-service condition or gain the ability to remotely execute code” through VMware Workstation 15’s guest mode. What makes this possible is an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in driver file ATIDXX64.DLL, which malicious actors can trigger by sending a “specially crafted shader file.”
There are four vulnerabilities in total:
- AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL shader functionality constant buffer denial-of-service vulnerability (TALOS-2019-0913/CVE-2019-5124)
- AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL MOVC shader functionality denial-of-service vulnerability (TALOS-2019-0936/CVE-2019-5147)
- AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL MAD shader functionality denial-of-service vulnerability (TALOS-2019-0937/CVE-2019-5146)
- AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL shader functionality VTABLE remote code execution vulnerability (TALOS-2019-0964/CVE-2019-5183)
Users are urged to update to Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.1, which patches these issues.
Some reporters have accused AMD of hiding these vulnerabilities. That’s because 20.1.1 was released two weeks ago (the latest version is 20.1.3), and its release notes didn’t mention anything about them.
Hopefully, that’s not the case. NVIDIA has been quite transparent about security issues affecting its GPU products, so AMD should be doing the same.