AMD remote execution vulnerability

I’ve led coordinated disclosure processes within organizations and participated as a reporter, so I’m sympathetic to the people trying to make the process work. It is a difficult task.

However, we are well over two decades into responsible disclosure, and one of the world’s largest processor manufacturers is committing failures like this. If the reporting is accurate, AMD’s auto-updater downloaded software updates insecurely and did not verify signatures. That is inexcusable for a company of this scale. Authenticated updates and signature verification are the basics. These are not exotic research problems. They are baseline engineering responsibilities.

What concerns me most is how we, as a community, treat the completion of the responsible disclosure process as the end of the matter. A bug is reported. A patch is issued. There is a brief news cycle. The reporter may receive credit. And then we collectively move on, as if fixing the bug and absorbing a modest amount of bad press is sufficient.

But the fact that issues like this exist at this scale should prompt harder questions. How did this pass design review? Where were the guardrails? What incentives allowed this to ship? What organizational decisions made this acceptable? Instead, the process itself becomes the story. The completion of disclosure is treated as evidence that the system works, when in reality it often just contains the damage.

These are billion-dollar firms. Issues like this should not exist at this level of maturity. In other industries, when bridges collapse or ships crash due to professional negligence, there are investigations, accountability, and reform. In software, the cost is frequently externalized and quietly absorbed, poisoning the system while no one feels the pain directly.

Responsible disclosure remains essential. But as it exists today, it too often serves to contain reputational damage rather than raise engineering standards. It should not function as closure. It should be the starting point for accountability and structural improvement. Otherwise, what are we doing?