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Intel ME: The Way of Static Analysis
- youdontknowtho 9y agoI thought that the ME was some weird off-brand JVM? Maybe that was a prior revision?
- pgeorgi 9y agoThe JVM runs as process on the OS. Older MEs used ThreadX on an ARC CPU. Current ME is the Quark x86 core (~486 class, in-order execution) running MINIX. Probably still running their JVM for applets (the off-CPU McAfee compliance manager is probably built that way).
- jlgaddis 9y agoMinix would be the OS that the JVM runs on top of.
- JepZ 9y agoRevenge of the Tanenbaum: Finally, he found a way to control Linux ;-) just kidding
- ricogallo 9y agoThat was a really good one :)
- grabcocque 9y agoThat's pretty cool tbh. Finally some geek cred for the ME.
- jokoon 9y agoI don't know what kind of speculations one could have about that. To be honest the more transistors components have, the more it is possible to have underlying software that can manage things or even be used as a backdoor.
- theprotocol 9y agoAm I right to be concerned about this, if only in principle? I don't like having a mysterious embedded chip that can access the network when my computer's off.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adtac 9y agoExactly. What is Intel's supposed reason for having such a feature?
- cyphar 9y agoIt's in the name, it's for management of enterprise deployments of machines that have Intel CPUs[1]. It's a fairly important thing for most enterprises (sort of like IPMI but it's not just for servers), as it allows you to do a variety of things to all computers that you manage. Now, whether that feature should be part of every consumer CPU is a valid question and concern -- one that nobody has the answer to. Likely the reason for this is that modern versions of ME also do hardware initialisation[2], so it would make sense for Intel to not require manufacturers to rewrite all of that code for their consumer machines. There have been exploits in Intel ME in the past, which are quite concerning (and the fact it's proprietary is obviously a concern, given how many privileges it has over the system). You can neuter Intel ME on old machines (pre-BootGuard) using me_cleaner[3], but it requires attaching a flash programmer to your motherboard. If you have coreboot you can do it from userspace. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno... [2]: https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Management_Engine https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Management_Engine [3]: https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner
- tptacek 9y agoThe Unix server vendors had these features long before Intel did. Having a common out-of-band management interface is hugely valuable for fleet management. It's not valuable at all for individual retail consumers; in the long run, SGX probably does for the entire Intel customer based, including retail, pretty much everything that the ME might have done for retail users.
- exikyut 9y agoI found some accompanying slides: https://www.troopers.de/downloads/troopers17/TR17_ME11_Static.pdf https://www.troopers.de/downloads/troopers17/TR17_ME11_Stati... That said, please note that this is partially outdated information (even to the extent of warranting a mod edit even though it's so recent) - the parts that mention how some compressed modules are unreadable are now irrelevant. The URL for this article is /2017/04/ (April). More recently (July, three months later), this same group has somehow (??) managed to derive the Huffman compression tables for the previously-inaccessible modules: https://github.com/ptresearch/unME11 https://github.com/ptresearch/unME11 I haven't read anything that explicitly states this (on HN; I don't read anywhere else), but I get the impression this is the holy grail, or at least one of the major pieces of the puzzle. I found this random comment about actually using unME11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15447841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15447841 This recent HN article suggests that it's also possible to get arbitrary remote code execution, but no details are (yet) forthcoming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833
- unlmtd1 9y agoDoing an open source version of ME is the way forward to get proactive security. So let's replace it with our own compilation of MINIX :D
- moppl 9y agoThis post seems outdated considering these more recent HN posts: Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode (ptsecurity.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15116719 How to hack a turned-off computer, or running unsigned code in Intel ME (blackhat.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833 Personally I am extremely curious about the upcoming blackhat presentation. If it is really true this might be very big.
- cyphar 9y agoBeing able to run unsigned code in ME might allow (depending on how the exploit works) for either a replacement of the ME firmware entirely or just doing a disable that exceeds even the HAP bit (and the rest of magic that me_cleaner does to remove different sections of the firmware). But we'll have to wait for the slides, I'm hoping there's something really useful there for the coreboot community.
- moppl 9y agoWell, it might also allow for the ultimate rootkit hack of x86 platforms...
- craftyguy 9y agoWell, it is technically a little outdated. The article OP posted is from April of this year, and the one you linked to was posted in August.
- j_s 9y agoIn addition to those two discussions (Aug 2017, 218 comments) & (Sep 2017, 239 comments), the following came up this week: Disabling the Intel Management Engine | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15444607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15444607 (Oct 2017, 219 comments) If nothing else, the BlackHat talk has stirred up interest in the Intel ME which had remained in relative obscurity for quite some time.