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According to the AMD advisory, 'Sinkclose' is a vulnerability that enables an elevation of privilege from an OS kernel to System Management Mode, a protected execution area reserved for firmware. Eclypsium has published numerous such issues in the past. Normally, #SMM would be used to perform firmware/hardware events at runtime, such as power management, bug fixes, and manufacturer-specific features. However, SMM is designed to be invisible to hypervisors, OS, apps, and pretty much everything else. Issues that enable attacks from SMM are a kind of holy grail for attackers. They allow control over anything, but leave no trace for cybersecurity tools to detect or stop. This includes every OS-based access control mechanism, as well as persistence mechanisms in a myriad of hidden firmware storage locations. While the statements that operating system access is required to implement a #Sinkclose attack are technically accurate, readers should not dismiss this attack. Common techniques, like bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver (#BYOVD) and living-off-the-land, leverage inherent difficulty in the industry to continually undermine the expected protections that sit between a piece of malware and this higher-level operating system privilege. As a result, attackers are clearly aware of nearly universal mechanisms that often move their level of privilege from any software down to the OS kernel. The Sinkclose technique provides the same thing that brings attackers down to the firmware level (below the OS). An important consideration is the end-user impact of the mitigations released. The firmware and microcode updates required to fix the issue need to be distributed from AMD to manufacturers, and all the manufacturers need to release model-specific updates. This takes time and is prone to oversight. Moreover, even when all these updates are released, end users almost never get automatic updates for firmware and microcode. As a result, attackers are almost guaranteed to find vulnerable machines for many years to come. This is exactly the sort of issue that Eclypsium exists to protect against. The industry desperately needs visibility into these black-box areas of our trusted systems. Every other security mechanism is dependent on things like SMM already being secure. Eclypsium was created to directly inspect and monitor systems for issues like Sinkclose. Right now, it is the only option to handle malware that uses techniques like Sinkclose.

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