A few hours after the announcement of “Project Circuit Braker”, information has published a precise reviews the safety of its products during 2021.
The American company reports that 93% of the vulnerabilities addressed are the result of its investments in the field of security: half of the 226 CVEs handled in 2021 were discovered internallyby the company’s employees, while 86% of the other half were reported by external researchers through the bug bounty program. As well, 77% of hardware and firmware vulnerabilities were discovered internallywhile 70% of software flaws have been identified by external researchers.
The report is quite interesting for insiders and even exists in the last part a comparison with its rival AMD. In 2021, they were found 16 vulnerabilities in Intel processorsplus 51 related to GPUs for a total of 67. As far as AMD is concerned, the flaws identified in its CPUs were 31while those related to graphics reached 27, for a combined total of 58.
While the number of vulnerabilities found on the CPU front rewards Intel, the overall figure is not due to the greater number of vulnerabilities found in the graphics area. There is a but:we have not identified any CVEs released by AMD in 2021 attributable to its internal research. Therefore, the information in this comparison is based solely on AMD CVEs attributable to external research”. Also, “AMD data only covers May through December 2021”. Note that Intel does not state the severity of the issues , but look in depth , it is mostly middle and high level issues on both sides.
Intel points out that with respect to graphics-related vulnerabilities, several are related to AMD graphics components used in its chips (we are talking about Kaby Lake-G, processor with AMD graphics used in Hades Canyon NUCs and in a Dell XPS 15 2 in 1). For example, CVE INTEL-SA-00481 for Intel Core processors with Radeon RX Vega M graphics contains 23 flaws related to the rival’s component.
However, it’s worth noting that within Intel alone, it was precisely GPUs that saw the highest number of CVEs in 2021, and we’re not sure if that’s a good or bad thing given the beginnings of the dedicated. Arc GPU, followed by Ethernet and Software with 34.