>From a crypto list, seemed relevant here. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: =JeffH <jeff.hod...@kingsmountain.com> Date: Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 7:04 PM Subject: [Cryptography] Intel Management Engine pwnd (was: How to find hidden/undocumented instructions To: "Crypto (moderated) list" <cryptogra...@metzdowd.com>
Oh joy... Intel finds critical holes in secret Management Engine hidden in tons of desktop, server chipsets https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/20/intel_flags_firmware_flaws/ By Thomas Claburn in San Francisco 20 Nov 2017 at 23:53 Intel today admitted its Management Engine (ME), Server Platform Services (SPS), and Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple worrying security flaws, based on the findings of external security experts. The firmware-level bugs allow logged-in administrators, and malicious or hijacked high-privilege processes, to run code beneath the operating system to spy on or meddle with the computer completely out of sight of other users and admins. The holes can also be exploited by network administrators, or people masquerading as admins, to remotely infect machines with spyware and invisible rootkits, potentially. Meanwhile, logged-in users, or malicious or commandeered applications, can leverage the security weaknesses to extract confidential and protected information from the computer's memory, potentially giving miscreants sensitive data – such as passwords or cryptographic keys – to kick off other attacks. This is especially bad news on servers and other shared machines. In short, a huge amount of Intel silicon is secretly running code that is buggy and exploitable by attackers and malware to fully and silently compromise computers. The processor chipsets affected by the flaws are as follows: 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processors Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 and v6 processors Intel Xeon Scalable processors Intel Xeon W processors Intel Atom C3000 processors Apollo Lake Intel Atom E3900 series Apollo Lake Intel Pentiums Celeron N and J series processors Intel's Management Engine, at the heart of today's disclosures, is a computer within your computer. It is Chipzilla's much maligned coprocessor at the center of its vPro suite of features, and it is present in various chip families. It has been assailed as a "backdoor" – a term Intel emphatically rejects – and it is a mechanism targeted by researchers at UK-based Positive Technologies, who are set to reveal in detail new ways to exploit the ME next month. The Management Engine is a barely documented black box. it has its own CPU and its own operating system – recently, an x86 Quark core and MINIX – that has complete control over the machine, and it functions below and out of sight of the installed operating system and any hypervisors or antivirus tools present. It is designed to allow network administrators to remotely or locally log into a server or workstation, and fix up any errors, reinstall the OS, take over the desktop, and so on, which is handy if the box is so messed up it can't even boot properly. The ME runs closed-source remote-administration software to do this, and this code contains bugs – like all programs – except these bugs allow hackers to wield incredible power over a machine. The ME can be potentially abused to install rootkits and other forms of spyware that silently snoop on users, steal information, or tamper with files. SPS is based on ME, and allows you to remotely configure Intel-powered servers over the network. TXE is Intel's hardware authenticity technology. Previously, the AMT suite of tools, again running on ME, could be bypassed with an empty credential string. Today, Intel has gone public with more issues in its firmware. It revealed it "has identified several security vulnerabilities that could potentially place impacted platforms at risk" following an audit of its internal source code: In response to issues identified by external researchers, Intel has performed an in-depth comprehensive security review of our Intel Management Engine (ME), Intel Server Platform Services (SPS), and Intel Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) with the objective of enhancing firmware resilience. The flaws, according to Intel, could allow an attacker to impersonate the ME, SPS or TXE mechanisms, thereby invalidating local security features; "load and execute arbitrary code outside the visibility of the user and operating system"; and crash affected systems. The severity of the vulnerabilities is mitigated by the fact that most of them require local access, either as an administrator or less privileged user; the rest require you to access the management features as an authenticated sysadmin. <snip/> _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptogra...@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/CACXcFmk7bKBK3F176K%2BhB9p4k0q5N%2BJG1d0TMXVAtWwL4B2LEA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
