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What's especially creepy is that many devices (e.g. laptops) with USB ports continue sending power to those ports even when the device is off. So someone bugge
by zbentley 9y ago
What's especially creepy is that many devices (e.g. laptops) with USB ports continue sending power to those ports even when the device is off.
So someone bugged with something like this implant could fully power off their laptop when discussing sensitive information, and if they left a bugged USB drive plugged in, they could still be compromised.
- QAPereo 9y agoBug or feature?
- floofyfloofer 9y agoFug!
- toomuchtodo 9y agoConfigurable option. Charge my iPhone, don’t power a bug.
- avian 9y agoFeature. It allows, among other things, for a computer to be woken up via the (USB-connected) keyboard.
- ThePadawan 9y agoAlso a branding/design feature. I've encountered extended color coding on multiple gaming oriented motherboards: Black for USB 2, Blue for USB 3.1 (so far so standard), Red for persistently powered. That way you can have your phone connected to that port and have it charge overnight, etc.
- scurvy 9y agoOr USB connected IR/RF remote (think media center PC's)
- otp124 9y agoI’d call it a feature. I sometimes need to harvest energy from my computer’s power supply to charge my phone without the computer being on (waste of energy)
- pkaye 9y agoYou can check the BIOS to see if there is an option to disable it.
- danesparza 9y agoGood luck with that: http://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-ope...
- pkaye 9y agoThat is a different issue. The article was about an external USB device. Also I don't understand the concern with people not trusting Intel. By using their hardware in any form you are inherently trusting them. Unless you are able to check their design and fabrication process, they could easily hide something in there to disable protections in Windows or Linux based on certain patterns of network traffic.
- khedoros1 9y agoSay that we trust Intel completely. Does that somehow make AMT not a security concern? For the ME itself, especially if it's not connected to any networking hardware: Whatever. It seems more like a theoretical threat than a practical problem. AMT sounds like something that I don't want running on my machine, even if I trust Intel itself completely.
- simion314 9y agoI think a CPU that has no mini PC inside it is much easy to verify, you can try a lot of inputs and see if the output gets weird, I think this technique was used to discover some hidden switches in Intel that the government uses to work around the ME on their own systems.
- pkaye 9y agoOkay lets say that the ethernet MAC has some gates that detect a particular 1024-bit random bit pattern in packets and that triggers a behavior change in certain sequence of instructions common in Windows security code to bypass it. How would you discover this?
- frankydp 9y agoThere are good reasons why USBs have been banned in the DOD for over a decade.