AMD is working on patches for Ryzen and Epyc chip vulnerabilities

Chipmaker confirms that patches will be released in the 'coming weeks'

AMD has revealed that it is working on patches to address security flaws uncovered in its Ryzen and Epyc chips.

Last week, Israeli cybersecurity start-up CTS Labs claimed to have discovered a string of security flaws in the architecture of AMD's latest Ryzen and Epyc CPUs. The flaws, the company claimed could enable hackers to compromise PCs and servers with AMD microprocessors.

In total, CTS Labs found 13 "serious" vulnerabilities and identified "multiple critical security vulnerabilities and exploitable manufacturer backdoors" in AMD's chips.

In a 20-page white paper about the flaws, which kept the technical details to a minimum, CTS Labs claimed that the flaws "have the potential to put organisations at significantly increased risk of cyber attacks" and could enable "malicious actors to permanently install malicious code inside the Secure Processor itself".

"The vulnerabilities we have discovered allow bad actors who infiltrated the network to persist in it, surviving computer reboots and reinstallations of the operating system," the report suggested.

However, AMD claims that it has already devised new firmware patches and software versions that eradicate the problems altogether.

The company has not confirmed an exact release date, but has said that patches will be released be in the "coming weeks".

"AMD has rapidly completed its assessment and is in the process of developing and staging the deployment of mitigations."

AMD questioned the research from CTS Labs, for which it was given just 24 hours notice of publication, saying that hackers would still need to have administrator-level access to computers in order to launch effective attacks.

"Any attacker gaining unauthorized administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research," it explained.

"Further, all modern operating systems and enterprise-quality hypervisors today have many effective security controls, such as Microsoft Windows Credential Guard in the Windows environment, in place to prevent unauthorized administrative access."

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Intel was affected by similar problems when it was found all of the firm's chips from the past decade were exposed to flaws known as Meltdown and Spectre.