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"I honestly can't understand the mass hysteria around this." "Mass hysteria?" Consumers thought they were just buying a CPU running what they put on it. Instea

"I honestly can't understand the mass hysteria around this." "Mass hysteria?" Consumers thought they were just buying a CPU running what they put on it. Instead, it has a second CPU that can watch or control what they're doing. That CPU has a network stack, web server, and what seems to be hackable software. Intel also won't remove it. There wasn't demand among most individual buyers but this risky setup was forced on them anyway. Being forced to run a backdoored CPU on a hostile Internet just to continue to use x86 applications should create a strong, well-deserved backlash. Business sector is different where there was lots of demand for management capabilities. That means there should be two tiers of products with and without the built-in backdoors. That responds to the expectations of each. The businesses probably also prefer the remote administration itself to be secure. Intel had things available but didn't use them to save about $50k from what I can tell on something that generates billions in revenue. There's a segment of business needing management capabilities that would prefer to buy from a third party offering quality software in event Intel is going to slap some stuff together. Their interests aren't served even though there are such solutions in the PPC and ARM markets esp for embedded. One other thing worth mentioning is that Intel and Microsoft were part of the Trusted Computing Group that were trying to use both CPU and OS modifications to force DRM on consumers for movie and music industry. Lots of their presentations bragged about how Intel's chips, esp with TPM's, might do that. So, it's probably also a conspiracy against consumers by tech companies who must have taken bribes from those who wanted DRM or have some other incentive (eg NSA's BULLRUN or FISA courts). Again, at least on DRM, there was backlash that watered it down a bit where it ended up fragmented such as protected media path in Windows, encryption for HDMI, etc. Do note that there's nothing stopping Intel from setting it up as a general-purpose core that can run user-supplied code which can be a firmware package like ME, a third party alternative which might be FOSS, or nothing at all. Intel forcing it is almost certainly about benefiting them and their scheming partners at everyone's expense instead of a fair, mutually-beneficial offering. People should be mad. They should also boycott any company doing that if they can. In the past, the solution was PowerPC or SPARC since they supported Open Firmware standard. Leon3, a SPARC for embedded, was GPL'd entirely. For high-end, OpenPOWER has open firmware with Raptor Computing Systems planning to deploy them in their Talos line when IBM puts POWER9 on the market.

ksk 9y ago
An end user of the machine has to take manual steps to specifically enable the functionality for remote management. But if you want to list all the things inside your computer that run a CPU/microcontroller which you don't control, you will have to include USB drives, hard disks, network cards, GPU cards, BIOS/SMM/IPMI, sound cards, web cams, monitors, keyboards, mice, etc, etc. All of these have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to hacking.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Unlike Intel ME, these are all possible to secure in principle. You can replace a vulnerable piece of hardware. You can limit memory and bus access using IOMMU. You can run the drivers in a locked down virtual machine. You can theoretically reverse engineer a driver if required. None of this is possible with Intel ME. Similar with SMM blobs, but these are optional. Firmware is replaceable in at least theory with something like coreboot, and if not, you still have multiple options on various mainboards.
  - ksk 9y ago
    Well, I do see a distinction between 'ME has bugs', and 'ME is designed to be insecure and allow remote takeover'. From what I have read, ME requires provisioning to be enabled. Even the so called 'zero touch' provisioning requires you to first reboot the machine, then run a special DHCP server that sends out an Intel certificate. An attacker would have to forge this certificate, which has to be limited to the domain the specific computer exists in, get physical access to the network to run a DHCP server, reboot the machine, and then be able to provision it (if at all).
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  "An end user of the machine has to take manual steps to specifically enable the functionality for remote management." Nah, the stuff is already there, running, listening, and able to do things. Your tools enable you to see it doing it or extra functionality on top of the base software. Here's a nice presentation by a team working to replace as much of it as possible to show all the horrors: https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20with%20Linux.pdf https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20wit... The difference between this and all those peripherals you brought up is that we wanted the peripherals because they were useful to us. They were even publicly advertised in the store or online description of the computer. We neither asked for nor were sold on a pile of software running things like web servers that we couldn't turn off, see, or secure. As in, we already buy security and monitoring products since that matters to us. Yet, we can't even see that software much less secure it. An intentional, unwanted backdoor and hidden OS is different concept from accidental flaws in firmware on peripherals we found useful. Also, we have options with those ranging from not buying the peripheral to using one with little programmability to isolating it with IO/MMU. Not for CPU backdoors. And again, there's other vendors using open firmware showing all this secrecy and lack of user control was totally unnecessary. It's like Intel and AMD have an ulterior motive in not letting us turn off features that were built to support DRM and/or spying.

ksk 9y ago

An end user of the machine has to take manual steps to specifically enable the functionality for remote management. But if you want to list all the things inside your computer that run a CPU/microcontroller which you don't control, you will have to include USB drives, hard disks, network cards, GPU cards, BIOS/SMM/IPMI, sound cards, web cams, monitors, keyboards, mice, etc, etc. All of these have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to hacking.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Unlike Intel ME, these are all possible to secure in principle. You can replace a vulnerable piece of hardware. You can limit memory and bus access using IOMMU. You can run the drivers in a locked down virtual machine. You can theoretically reverse engineer a driver if required. None of this is possible with Intel ME. Similar with SMM blobs, but these are optional. Firmware is replaceable in at least theory with something like coreboot, and if not, you still have multiple options on various mainboards.
- ksk 9y ago
  Well, I do see a distinction between 'ME has bugs', and 'ME is designed to be insecure and allow remote takeover'. From what I have read, ME requires provisioning to be enabled. Even the so called 'zero touch' provisioning requires you to first reboot the machine, then run a special DHCP server that sends out an Intel certificate. An attacker would have to forge this certificate, which has to be limited to the domain the specific computer exists in, get physical access to the network to run a DHCP server, reboot the machine, and then be able to provision it (if at all).
nickpsecurity 9y ago
"An end user of the machine has to take manual steps to specifically enable the functionality for remote management." Nah, the stuff is already there, running, listening, and able to do things. Your tools enable you to see it doing it or extra functionality on top of the base software. Here's a nice presentation by a team working to replace as much of it as possible to show all the horrors: https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20with%20Linux.pdf https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20wit... The difference between this and all those peripherals you brought up is that we wanted the peripherals because they were useful to us. They were even publicly advertised in the store or online description of the computer. We neither asked for nor were sold on a pile of software running things like web servers that we couldn't turn off, see, or secure. As in, we already buy security and monitoring products since that matters to us. Yet, we can't even see that software much less secure it. An intentional, unwanted backdoor and hidden OS is different concept from accidental flaws in firmware on peripherals we found useful. Also, we have options with those ranging from not buying the peripheral to using one with little programmability to isolating it with IO/MMU. Not for CPU backdoors. And again, there's other vendors using open firmware showing all this secrecy and lack of user control was totally unnecessary. It's like Intel and AMD have an ulterior motive in not letting us turn off features that were built to support DRM and/or spying.