Originally posted by Qaridarium
I might quote this thing from English Wikipedia page on timing attack which the Wiki page you talked of mentioned as the latest approach on the problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack
"Timing attacks are easier to mount if the adversary knows the internals of the hardware implementation, and even more so, the crypto system in use. Since cryptographic security should never depend on the obscurity of either (see security through obscurity, specifically both Shannon's Maxim and Kerchoff's Law), resistance to timing attacks should not either. If nothing else, an exemplar can be purchased and reverse engineered. Timing attacks and other side-channel attacks may also be useful in identifying, or possibly reverse-engineering, a cryptographic algorithm used by some device."
Meaning someone would need to purposefully reverse-engineer the AMD security implementation to get absolute certainty that the cracking would actually work indefinitely.
This seems to be one of the reasons for why AMD is so cautious about giving out full hardware specifications of their cards.
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