5 ms·
Something Richard Stallman, among others, was sounding alarm bells for years.
by AsyncAwait 10y ago
Something Richard Stallman, among others, was sounding alarm bells for years.
- MohammadLee 10y agoAnd yet here we are, unable to properly deactivate "features" such as Intel ME.
- MichaelGG 10y ago... Here we are, with an exploit that only affects people that enabled a remote management feature. If Intel had made this an optional addon that required a physical switch to enable, approximately the same number of people would be affected today, since it requires provisioning. It's not like every Intel system is silently waiting for an exploit payload.
- 0x0 10y agoIt looks like this also affects systems where the feature is not enabled, but for "local" attackers. Does that mean exec as "www-data" or "nobody" accounts (what about VMs?). Making every little wordpress plugin vulnerability into a CPU-rooting hack?
- Kalium 10y agoFrom what we can see so far, potentially more the latter than the former.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 10y agoPretty much every large company running Intel hardware on professional desktops will have AMT on. It's pretty much SOP unless you really like site visits. That's a lot of computers worldwide.
- thraway2016 10y agoIs there any reason KVM/IP is not a viable solution for remote management? Remote access to DMA capability is just batshit insanity.
- jacquesm 10y agoThis works even absent an OS. In fact, that's the whole idea.
- microwavecamera 10y agoI read about this a while ago. Apparently Intel's Management Technology which is built into like every Intel CPU now listens directly on the network interface so it can still send/receive data in case the OS is borked. It hooks in at ring 0. Like a rootkit the OS can't see.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoIt's common in the datacenter to come across motherboards with a switched eth0, with the BMC behind one leg and the user system behind another. You don't have to get that creative to get IPMI out of a machine when the OS is hosed -- to be honest, I think that is what you're actually thinking of, because "hook[ing] in on ring 0" is difficult to imagine working. You'd need driver awareness for when the management plane wants to transmit, at the least.
- djsumdog 10y agoIt's not just Intel that does it. HP Storage solutions use iLO which is pretty much the same thing for SANs.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoNot just SANs, pretty much their entire product line. iLO is a very common IPMI deployment at companies with HPe gear, which is a number of very large ones.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- justabystander 10y ago> only affects people that enabled a remote management feature. The AMT can't be completely disabled, so people might not have to explicitly enable it to be vulnerable to AMT exploits. > It's not like every Intel system is silently waiting for an exploit payload. It's not like it's Intel makes it easy to navigate their CPU and motherboards feature set. Manufacturers are also known to do a bad job on their BIOS/EFI. And given that the computers most likely to be vulnerable are those most likely to be used by businesses and professionals, the damage potential is pretty staggering. But yeah, netbooks are probably safe.
- turblety 10y agoHey Michael, that's pretty amazing you have audited an encrypted and closed source binary from Intel to discover each Intel chip doesn't listen for an exploit payload. Would you mind sharing the keys you used to decrypt the firmware or the techniques you used to dissemble the binary back to the source code?
- MohammadLee 9y agoDon't cry man, at least I feel quite confident that these backdoors are efficiently NOBUS
- m-p-3 10y agoExactly, any tool/service/software installed and running on a system is a potential vector of exploitation. There's a reason you want to keep the amount of softwares installed on a critical system, other than performance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]