I came across this news today. Bloomberg says China is using a rice-sized chip
to hack amazon servers. They published videos and photos here:
https://twitter.com/business/status/1047788207557865473
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
They publish very limited evidence, so it leads me questioning whether the
report is true. As a worker in China's hardware industry, I'm very concerned
with this report. Is this true or just another fake news deliberately created
to escalate the trade war between US and China?
They did not mention the product name. But they published a gif image, then I
did a little research to compare Supermicro's Microblade severs with the one in
this gif file. It seems the product is the MBI-6128R-T2
https://www.supermicro.com/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6128R-T2.cfm
This board has dual socket R3 (LGA 2011) that supports Intel® Xeon® processor
E5-2600 v4†/ v3 family. So the processor is likely to be an intel one. So this
board may support Intel's strict security features like BootGuard and Intel ME.
These security features are so strong that even the top hackers in the open
source community haven't fully cracked...
The only techinical information they give is: The chips could do all this
because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of
superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers,
giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have
crashed or are turned off. (It sounds like something related with the IPMI? Is
this really can be done? Even this can be done, can this be used to access
data?)
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