alt Hacker NewsIt's ridiculous to consider MITM attacks out of scope for taking over your computer. Also, there are probably ways to exploit this without a true MITM like DNS cache poisoning. But it's best to just assume the whole internet is MITMed.
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MITM where attacker needs to install their own CA certs on the victim's device -- sure, out of scope.
MITM because you used http instead of https and you don't have any other verified cryptographic signature on your data -- get tae fuck, fix it pronto.
Why would anyone ever exclude true mitm?
Various domain registrars have been compromised over and over again (often by children!), resulting in companies like Tesla and Cloudflare getting owned.
The reality is that any vaguely competent attacker can compromise a court clerk and just compel e.g. the .com registry to hand over whatever domain they want.
Although I suppose the aforementioned problem has significant implications beyond dns…
Out of scope does not necessarily mean out of impact. It is merely a question of how far a company wants to be responsible for the environment their software is run in. Most of the time that answer is "not much."
But I use a Wi-Fi password, so my phone says it's secure!
It's not out of scope "for taking over your computer". It's out of scope for the specific goals of the bug bounty program. Bug bounties are (usually) about prioritizing internal engineering effort; they are to vulnerability remediation what market feedback is to feature/function decisions in the rest of the product.
Everyone's judging this by the standard of "how good a bug" this is. But that's not necessarily how a bug bounty should function. Important prior to frame this with: neither any individual bug bounty submission nor the sum of all valid submissions materially alters the security of a serious product, at least not on their own. The system they feed into (for instance: security engineers taking a validated bounty submission and then quickly auditing the entire tree for variants of the same bug) can move the dials. The bounty bugs themselves though are mostly a sideshow.
What's especially weird (you didn't say this, but the sentiment has popped up on all 3 threads about this story) is the idea that AMD would be trying to cover this up. Why would they care? They run a bug bounty program. They've accepted the premise that they have vulnerabilities.
(From earlier today, in add'n: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492908).