4 ms·

Good times when kernel privilege escalation was the worst you had to fear. I'm not familiar enough with the Intel ME to tell, but could this possibly be exploi

Good times when kernel privilege escalation was the worst you had to fear. I'm not familiar enough with the Intel ME to tell, but could this possibly be exploited with the arbitrary code execution in the ME being used to set the HAP bit without requiring hardware intervention?

jlgaddis 9y ago
That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? Maybe I'll hold off on patching for a bit.
- mysterypie 9y ago
  > Maybe I'll hold off on patching for a bit. I think you're suggesting extremely interesting but I'm not totally clear on it. So someone[1] has come up with some code to either disable (kill switch) or remove the Intel ME. (Setting the HAP bit is the kill switch.) Now Intel and its vendors are going to issue a patch for the Intel ME. Are you saying that as a result of applying this patch we might not be able disable or remove the Intel ME? In other words, we'll end up with a slightly more secure Intel ME, but be worse off since we can't exploit any bugs to get rid of it? If I'm understanding you correctly, this sounds like the iPhone situation: upgrade to a newer iOS and lose the ability to jailbreak. [1] https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/wiki/HAP-AltMeDisable-bit https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/wiki/HAP-AltMeDisable-bi...
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    Basically, yeah. Hold off on patching this vulnerability so that it can be exploited later in order to disable ME entirely. Their firmware updates could very well close off these existing "known holes", making them impossible to exploit. If we can take advantage of them to kill the ME entirely, that's even better than Intel releasing this fix.