AMD patches critical vulnerabilities in its Radeon graphics cards

The research team from Cisco Talos has spotted four exploitable vulnerabilities in AMD ATIDXX64.DLL driver that can affect VMware Workstation running on Windows, according to recent Talos Vulnerability reports.

The security issues, tracked as CVE-2019-5124, CVE-2019-5146, CVE-2019-5147 and CVE-2019-5183, were tested on Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series VMware Workstation 15 (15.5.0 build-14665864) with Windows 10 x64 as guestVM. The researchers concluded that a threat actor could perform a denial of service (DoS) attack or allow for remote execution of arbitrary code on a targeted system.

While remote execution of arbitrary code would require an attacker to use the available vulnerability to inject a malicious file in a system, a DoS attack can cause a service to become unavailable or crash the operating system.

The security issues include:

• AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL MAD shader functionality denial-of-service vulnerability tested in version 26.20.13025.10004 (CVE-2019-5146)
• AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL MOVC shader functionality denial-of-service vulnerability tested in version 26.20.13003.1007 (CVE-2019-5147)
• AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL shader functionality constant buffer denial-of-service vulnerability in version 26.20.13001.50005 (CVE-2019-5124)
• AMD ATI Radeon ATIDXX64.DLL shader functionality VTABLE remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-5183) tested in version 26.20.13031.10003, 26.20.13031.15006 and 26.20.13031.18002

The research team mentioned that all vulnerabilities pose a high security risk as a remote non-authenticated attacker can exploit them. Neither Talos nor AMD are aware of exploitation of the flaws.

The vendor quickly reacted to the news and released a fix, recommending users to update version 15.5.1 with 20.1.1, available in the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.1 Driver for Windows.