AMD laptops without "Platform Security Processor"

[Fernando Negro]

But is there no internal discussion about this @AMD? Don't the officials see that there could be a clear selling point? It's not only FOSS nerds, Google and others are throwing effort at getting rid of this stuff and AMD is ignoring it, establishing the same risks and unwanted anti-features.

Hello, juno.

That's part of what I'm talking about, when I say that "I happen to know how evil big corporations really are, and what their plans for complete surveillance are"...

First of all, the major corporations only compete with each other at a certain level (to cause faster R&D, caused by this competition) among lower-level executives. But, when it comes to the highest levels, they work as cartels. (And, if anyone has doubts about what I'm saying, you can check what do the leaders of every major corporation, or their representatives, do every year in the secretive "Bilderberg" meetings.)

Second, there is a clear move, by every major corporation, to increasingly make everything more *insecure* and *less private*. Being this the (real) reason why (even though they are all made from different companies) phones now have OSes that can send data to the Internet, why you now have very good photo/video cameras and also GPS devices on your phones, why you can now open your car with a simple remote control, why there are cars that now have computers with the ability to respond to outside wireless communications (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUYMPZ4nEOY#t=29m), why you now have printers that react to and emit wireless data, why there are TVs that now listen to what people are saying in their living rooms etc.

Third, this has all been denounced by people with contacts in intelligence agencies (responsible for the security of some of the secretive meetings between the leaders of the major corporations and their puppet governments) as part of a plan to gradually increase the surveillance and control of the population, from the part of this big "state-corporate" conglomerate association (https://www.amazon.com/True-Story-Bi...dp/0979988624/).

So, if you're looking for concerns about the privacy and security of the people who use their products, from the part of big corporations, you better look elsewhere... (A friend of mine tried to launch a computer company focused exactly on this - but, because very few people are concerned with these issues, and he had to practise higher prices, this friend of mine was not able to survive on the market. And, there are other people to which the same thing has happened.)

[bridgman]

But is there no internal discussion about this @AMD? Don't the officials see that there could be a clear selling point? It's not only FOSS nerds, Google and others are throwing effort at getting rid of this stuff and AMD is ignoring it, establishing the same risks and unwanted anti-features.

Why do you assume there is no discussion going on at AMD just because we don't give you weekly status updates ?

[juno]

Why do you assume there is no discussion going on at AMD just because we don't give you weekly status updates ?

I don't assume, as you can see it was a question.

And it's not just about me, but thousands of customers that expressed their displeasure already and have not received an answer yet.

So, why do you assume the opposite?

[bridgman]

The wording suggested you had already reached a conclusion. Sorry if I got that wrong.

Don't understand why you say "customers... have not received an answer yet" though...

Customers *have* received an answer already - it's just not the "we will magically make PSP go away despite it being a core part of the chip" answer they hoped for.

We have announced at least one step (third party audit for security/robustness) and are continuing to work on others.

[chithanh]

The 3rd party audit is a step, but not a step in the right direction. It is a placebo at best, intended to placate customers. Worst case, AMD contracts untrustworthy auditors, who might sell some discovered vulnerabilities on black market instead of reporting them all to AMD (the usual way to counter this threat is to let multiple parties that are assumed to be non-colluding perform independent reviews, but I have the feeling that AMD is going the cheap route here).

[juno]

The wording suggested you had already reached a conclusion. Sorry if I got that wrong.

Don't understand why you say "customers... have not received an answer yet" though...

Customers *have* received an answer already - it's just not the "we will magically make PSP go away despite it being a core part of the chip" answer they hoped for.

We have announced at least one step (third party audit for security/robustness) and are continuing to work on others.

No, I haven't. Sorry, if my wording seemed suggestive to you, it's not my mother tongue.

OK, I should've been more specific here and write satisfactory answer. Because for me (and seemingly many others) it's not really that to have some employee comment on reddit with something like "we hear you and are evaluating", and then not speak for months, while in the meantime a toggle in the BIOS settings of a board vendor appeared.

I also don't think anybody was expecting a magical disappearance. First of all we want information. About the system and about future plans, what can be done and what not. It's not that there are no people caring and working for that kind of stuff (libre-/coreboot devs and more). It's no conspiracy against AMD or something. Stop acting like you are under attack.

And btw, I don't think anyone will drop his doubts about the security through obscurity thing when there is a third party audit. Also, security is not the main concern of customers, it's arguably more about privacy and control. So instead of having it work as intended (by whoever) not being exposed to it at all.

[bridgman]

OK, I should've been more specific here and write satisfactory answer. Because for me (and seemingly many others) it's not really that to have some employee comment on reddit with something like "we hear you and are evaluating", and then not speak for months, while in the meantime a toggle in the BIOS settings of a board vendor appeared.

You may not have caught all the communication. A month or so after "we hear you and are evaluating" we came back and said that we were arranging third party audits, and then came back with a subsequent statement that (a) multiple audits had taken place and (b) a couple of our larger customers had performed their own audits as well. That doesn't mean we stop looking for ways to address concerns though.

I also don't think anybody was expecting a magical disappearance. First of all we want information. About the system and about future plans, what can be done and what not. It's not that there are no people caring and working for that kind of stuff (libre-/coreboot devs and more).

What information are you talking about ? You know the subsystem is based on ARM's Trustzone. You know we have no plans to open up any more of the internals. You know the PSP plays a key role in chip initialization and can not just be disabled from the start. You know that we have no plans to remove PSP from future products but will continue looking for ways to address concerns with both current and future products. What do you feel is missing other than travelling back from the future with a report of the ideas we came up with next year ?

It's no conspiracy against AMD or something. Stop acting like you are under attack.

I'm curious, what did I say that suggested I thought there was a conspiracy or that we were under attack ?

And btw, I don't think anyone will drop his doubts about the security through obscurity thing when there is a third party audit. Also, security is not the main concern of customers, it's arguably more about privacy and control. So instead of having it work as intended (by whoever) not being exposed to it at all.

Agreed, and we are continuing to look for ways to address those concerns. I don't know much about the BIOS change other than what has been announced, but if it disables the registers used to communicate with PSP from the outside it sounds like a step in the right direction.

[Fernando Negro]

(Now, back to the initial topic...)

I was successful in finding the information I was looking for.

Crossing the information from the following webpages,

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...oarchitectures
http://www.cpu-world.com/Releases/Mo...es_(2013).html

I was able to figure out that, the last CPUs from AMD made for laptops, that are not part of the "Family 16h + systems" that come with a "Platform Security Processor (PSP)" were some belonging to the "Piledriver" 2nd generation 15h Family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piledr...roarchitecture)

The best ones that I could find, in the last (very good) website, were some quad-core models, with 2.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz clock speeds - which is not bad:

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldo...A10-5757M.html
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldo...A10-5745M.html
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldo...0A8-5557M.html

And, using only the "A10 Quad-Core" and "A8 Quad-Core" search options on eBay, I was already able to find a few models on sale.

Thank you all, very much, for your help.

[Fernando Negro]

Also, for those who might be interested to know/check the same thing for Intel laptops - without a "Management Engine (ME)" - I leave here the following links:

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets#Core/Core_2_mobile_chipsets

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel