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Is the 'Secret' Chip In Intel CPUs Really That Dangerous? (networkworld.com)
New submitter Miche67 writes: A recent Boing Boing blog post by Damien Zammit is stirring up fears, claiming Intel's x86 processors have a secret control mechanism that no one can audit or examine. And because of that, he says it could expose systems to undetectable rootkit attacks that cannot be killed.
Blogger Andy Patrizio, after talking with an Intel spokesperson, says the developer's argument has holes and he doesn't think Zammit will persuade Intel to replace the system with a free, open source option.
Blogger Andy Patrizio, after talking with an Intel spokesperson, says the developer's argument has holes and he doesn't think Zammit will persuade Intel to replace the system with a free, open source option.
So, what we have is an open source crusader scaring the daylights out of people on a giant what-if scenario that even he admits couldn't happen in our lifetimes.
An Intel spokesperson told the publication: While the Intel Management Engine is proprietary and Intel does not share the source code, it is very secure. Intel has a defined set of policies and procedures, managed by a dedicated team, to actively monitor and respond to vulnerabilities identified in released products. In the case of the Intel Management Engine, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise.
How nice ... Is there any history about how that has worked before?
So from what I can tell, this entire fiasco is basically some blogger who was clearly ignorant of how enterprise management features that have been present in hardware for *years* having an "OMG YOU TRANSMIT YOUR IP ADDRESS TO THE WORLD EVERY TIME YOU GO TO A WEBSITE!!" moment.
And it wasn't even that original since the same damn hissy fit gets thrown every year or so as memory serves, since this is by no means the first time I've heard the conspiracy theory.
So, either this guy is an idiot (not discounting that at all) or he managed to troll people into generating clicky clicky ad revenue by recycling conspiracy theories. Some of the people being trolled might be willing participants to boot.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
It is probably secure 'for now'.
What about in 10 years after the OEM has dropped all support for my computer? Is it still going to be updated and secure?
...someone bypasses those mechanisms? If they can get into the IME, they can put their own code in there and put anything they like in it.
The chip has the "power" to do many things including take secret control of a system, transfer files, read RAM, anything. No debate on that.
The "debate" is whether security through Intel obscurity (un-auditable unless you work for them) can be trusted FROM NOW ON, without checkups.
If history is any measure...
You are protected because we say so. We will make sure you are safe from threats we deem to be dangerous. Also please sign this EULA that says we can share your information with third-parties. Also by accepting this EULA you understand that we will hand over and execute any valid request from a government official.
K.I.S.S.
Google is a CIA eavesdropping tracking corporation (See Eric Schmidt works at Pentagon) so use DuckDuckGo.
Bing is also a CIA eavesdropping tracking corporation (See Eric Schmidt works at Pentagon) so use DuckDuckGo.
In the case of the Intel Management Engine, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise.
This means that there are people, with the ability to access and modify this. to fix it, or....
In the case of the Intel Management Engine, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise.
Umm, if Intel is the only holder of the keys to the kingdom, then they get to decide when the need arises. In fact, how much do you want to bet that if someone is nice enough to bring an issue to Intel's attention and Intel decides to take no action that there's a "by the way, if you so much as make a peep about this we'll bury you in an avalanche of DMCA litigation for the rest of your natural life"?
Forgive me if I'm skeptical about this. I think I'd rather have an agreement with Darth Vader. At least he doesn't pretend to be a nice guy.
The 'secret' they are referring to has been known for years as Intel AMT (Active Management Technology), basically it's Intel's own implementation of HP's iLO or Dell's DRAC, you need specialized software to access it, it's password protected, the passwords are encrypted in 256-bit, and their are no known exploits for it.
If people are seriously calling a technology of a CPU that Intel sells as a feature then the person who 'discovered' this knows nothing about technology or Sysadmin practices
case in point: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4oiu04/intel_x86_cpus_come_with_a_secret_backdoor_that/
"While the Intel Management Engine is proprietary and Intel does not share the source code, it is very secure."
Well alrighty then, I feel so much better now. Because when a technology company says something is "very secure", you can take that to the bank!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This capability has existed in certain CPU/chipsets since the Intel Core processors were released yet to date no one has successfully 'hacked' into this well-advertised feature...
Did this boing-boing blogger check with anyone that, you know, is fairly current on the Intel platform before exposing this 'incredible' security issue?
Ken
Anything I cannot audit, I have to trust. I have no reason to trust Intel. So yes, it is potentially dangerous because I can neither audit nor trust it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Obscurity is a perfectly acceptable security tool. We use it all of the time, in fact.
Any password used to authenticate with an online service is an instance of security by obscurity.
Any private key used to encrypt data is an instance of security by obscurity.
The PIN used when paying with plastic payment cards is an instance of security by obscurity.
The swipe gesture used to unlock a smart phone is an instance of security by obscurity.
The physical key you use to lock and unlock your home's door, or your vehicle's door, or the chastity device your wife makes you wear is an instance of security by obscurity.
Like most security tools, it shouldn't be used by itself, of course. But it's an essential part of many routine security activities that we likely all partake in on a daily basis.
Does obscurity also protects the hidden chip from Secret Warrants and similar things?
If they are confident of their security, they ought to be able to get Lloyds to insure users against any break-ins or damages at the few X 100B$ level. Oh, maybe they can't convince Lloyds that it is *that* secure?
One thing that Snowdon taught us is that even the NSA cannot protect secrets. And yes, you can fault the entire program because of a single slip up.
Intel has a defined set of policies and procedures, managed by a dedicated team, to actively monitor and respond to vulnerabilities identified in released products. In the case of the Intel Management Engine, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise.
Are they revealing they can turn their "secret chip" off remotely? Or perhaps even nuke the whole CPU?
If that would be the case, I guess some hardware hackers are going to have a field day.
If you can't audit the chose, it's not secure.
End of story.
there is some empirical evidence - nothing concrete that can be shared publicly - which tends to suggest that the RSA private key that Intel uses is already known and in use. if nothing else, you should not be reassured that there have been no "gagging orders" that come out of the U.S. Government on a regular basis, preventing and prohibiting companies from telling anyone that "yes we have had the NSA knocking on our door and yes we were forced to give them the RSA private key because otherwise they threatened that whoops, it would be really hard to get export licenses for our processors".
this kind of threat by security services is not outside the realm of possibility: it already happens, and i have met someone who was present at a meeting (with GCHQ) in which this type of threat to destabilise their business model was actually made.
there is a really simple solution, here: don't buy systems with intel processors. that assumes of course that people are making systems for sale that don't have intel processors... and that's exactly what i'm doing. i'm not one for complaining *without* actually doing something about it, so if you'd like to sign up for the crowdfunding campaign which will launch very shortly, you can do so here - http://crowdsupply.com/eoma68
"on a giant what-if scenario that even he admits couldn't happen in our lifetimes." AGW.
So basically they built in an backdoor into every modern intel CPU that is secured by technology they protect through obscurity.
/s
What could possibly go wrong?
AMT allows anyone who can broadcast DHCP and legitimately purchase a certificate from a CA to own your system while if it isn't even turned on.
If there is a defect (as if the above isn't bad enough) they won't bother to fix their bugs once they have decided your hardware is no longer worth their time to support... same as IPMI vendors and all the rest.
Even when you turn off "AMT" in bios if you are lucky enough to even have that option which I do not... it is STILL there listening. The only way I've found to limit this unnecessary and unwanted system within a system madness is to disable the hardware virtualization feature which prevents sharing of hardware with IME and operating system.
If this latest revelation scares you, you'll go apoplectic to discover that this is SOP in IC design. Just about every IC more complicated than a 555 timer, from processors to Wi-Fi chips to you-name-it, has internal processors controlling substantially every part of their operation. It's a common technique to control every block one designs with an embedded core and a bit of code (in RAM, so that one could adjust the operation of the block after the design came back from fab by reloading RAM), making an easy-to-design programmable state machine. One ends up with a dozen or more cores in each chip design. Often there is one core programmed to run the top level of the design, controlling the warmup and warmdown procedures, reboot sequence, etc.
Move along, nothing to see here.
While the Intel Management Engine is proprietary and Intel does not share the source code, it is very secure.
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I saw this.
No. Obviously not and the guy stirring up trouble is either underinformed or irresponsible.
Most of the hardware in your computer isn't something you get (or could get) a gate diagram from. You'd never know if something is in there that theoretically could be triggered to do something. That's the way hardware is. This guy is fussing over a publicly known feature that people are using in the enterprise to manage systems en masse. It doesn't open some magic wormhole to the control system - it requires a clear path of access and a setup and all that fun stuff. Meaning if you want to use IME, you need to set it up on all the systems for your network environment and debug it and build tooling around it. It's not fun to get that stuff right, and often not that easy.
It's not impossible that there's a backdoor in IME, but it's just as easy to imagine a backdoor anywhere else in your system. It's hard to imagine how one could ever be confident that that's not the case. So the focus and the anger is misaimed.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
1) carefully break hermetic seal of chip case in 0.15 micron clean room.
2) locate IME section on silicon under 300x microscope per diagram {secret}
3) using polygraphene pen under robotic control, connect IME die {secret} to {secret}.
4) hermetically evacuate clean room to -300 torr
5) reseal hermit chip case using {secret}
6) PROFIT!!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You can use FUD et al to entice them, but why would they otherwise open source it? They are under absolutely no obligation to do so, as you are under no obligation to trust them. If you don't, use another product from another vendor.
That said, all FUD aside, it is really bad judgement on intel's side to have this enabled by default (with many vendors using Intel's defaults without consideration), and then push the "drivers" so aggressively to users who have no idea what this is and that motherboard driver software includes all this crap.
While the Intel Management Engine is proprietary and Intel does not share the source code, it is very secure. ,,, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise.
Perhaps true, but this kind of talk makes my ass twitch.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
An Intel spokesperson told the publication: "it is very secure"
Well then, case closed!
I guess we just need to *ask* these sites if they're secure, and we'll stop leaking everyone's password.
take that to the bank you are hitting to get an "unlisted" account from??
everything related with secrecy in history of human civilization leaded to trouble. get a book hipster, your glasses are for reading, not to suck baby dicks.
I haven't followed the ruckus because it broke on one of those two-dot-oh web-o-rhea blogs I don't care to read, just like I don't care to read any "research" or other half-assed blogs from "computer security" companies. So it may well have clickbait-y hype qualities. However, that itself does not mean there is no problem. I would contend that there is a problem, it's been there for years, and it's getting worse.
That "enterprise management features" have for years done things this way (since ~2009 and ~2011 for intel and amd, respectively) does not mean that this is the right way to manage machines. We have had plenty of stories previously where people infected all sorts of things beyond the os, including bios, nic boot roms, you name it. Signing the boot ("secure boot") doesn't actually help either (but does conveniently take away control from the end-user). If you're sufficiently nefarious there will probably be some way to totally "pwn" any given machine. We have seen very shady things come by, including the still unresolved thing with the inaudible tone networking.
In particular to this here thing is that there's indeed a chip in the southbridge that runs a complete OS, and this does pretty much what a "lights-out-management" add-on card does. Those run their own embedded OS, hard to update, poorly audited, and "pwnable". Now the same thing sits in the south bridge. Can't turn it off, for if you try it'll shut down the entire system. So yes, this is problematic for a raft of reasons already.
On top of that, I've seen reports of the same system board from the same manufacturer, but manufactured in different countries (one engineering sample, the other production) look the same, show the same content of their firmware flash, but behave differently. Differences that went away with re-flashing. Meaning that some of these boards ran firmware that wasn't what you'd see if you'd look, IOW the actually active firmware actively hid that it was there, purporting to be a different firmware. This exposes the thing as a convenient back door for those in the know and with the means. Since this is the southbridge, that does mean that if you can get that LOM chip to do your bidding, you have complete control and access to the machine, bypassing the OS purportingly running the show on the "real" CPUs. And evidently you can, even if you're not the manufacturer.
So yes, despite the shouty hyping, this is an actual problem. You could make a good case it is actually worthy of the shouting and the hype, in fact.
The ME has been part of Intel chipsets for at least that long. If there was a problem, don't you think we'd've heard about it by now?
'Intel Management Engine (ME) .. described as "an extra general purpose computer running a firmware blob .. a chip protected by RSA 2048 security on a chip'
Can I replace this firmware blob with one of my own?
Can I replace the RSA key with one of my own?
Can I audit this firmware blob to see what it does?
Can I disable this ME subsystem?
Who else can access this ME subsystem?
"there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise."
So basically Intel and any designated third party can access your computer regardless of in place security mechanisms.
i am sure every cracker/hacker in the world is looking for access to this hidden system within the system
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Clipper?
In a month most of you will probably forget about this news.
what are the odds that the Intel spokesperson is an impartial source?
And when the FBI orders them to provide secret access to this chip running in all devices using it worldwide, they'll obviously break national security laws to inform the public, right? Oh, but of course, since it's the FBI, it'll still be secure from all (other) bad actors!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
It's a service processor. No big deal in itself, we had them as far back as mainframes go. The VAX-11/780 I worked on/with in college in the early 80s had a small PDP-11 (an LSI-11/23) in the bottom as a service processor. I'd be more worried about a much more direct avenue of attack: microcode updates. Every Windows system and most Linux boxes include the packages to take the latest firmware updates from Intel and AMD and download them into the CPU during system boot. If Intel wants to put something malicious into the chip, all it has to do is issue a firmware update with it and it'll get near-100% coverage. If a bad guy has the keys to sign an IME binary, they also have the keys to sign a firmware update.
If it's secure to intel or not; That suggests to me intel has a backdoor into every computer?
This is pretty much what you can expect from now on, because that's what sells alas.
I'm glad there are other sites that do what Slashdot does better at this point, but it's sad to see it go. Hopefully they'll have the decency to just disappear like kuro5hin did a few weeks back rather than keep this farce up for a few more years of ad revenue.
Holy shit, this ("nobody will guess the password") is the excuse?! I especially loved the dumbed-down "that's 2,048-bit security." That has meme potential.
Yes, the scaremonger admits that he hasn't guessed the password. Therefore it's secure. Got it. (Wow!)
If there's something to debate here, I think it's fair to say that shockingly over-the-top morons like Andy Patrizio aren't going to be contributing to the discussion, on either side.
I'm not sure the Intel spokesman is helping to assuage fears either: "there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise." It sounds like he's saying there's already a backdoor that Intel can use to fight anyone else who breaks in.
With advocates like these, Intel doesn't need critics. At least the Intel spokesman one is murkier and more vague, not obviously stupid like the blogger's. I like to imagine him pausing and deepening his voice right before saying "..mechanisms in place.." and a slightly dark chuckle right before "should the need arise." Oh let's face it, I imagine the spokesman sounds like Emperor Palpatine so I never want to hear his(her?) real voice.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
and you're still using Intel.
Have gnu, will travel.
> Who else can access this ME subsystem?
I'm pretty sure I can answer that one for you. The US Government. On demand (via National Security Letter, so no accountability of course). That's why IMHO the 'secret' chip in Intel CPUs really *is* that dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
"A national security letter (NSL) is an administrative subpoena issued by the United States federal government to gather information for national security purposes. NSLs do not require prior approval from a judge."
A better architecture would have the management engine off the main processor: leave the CPU for running user processes. Consider a small ARM processor running an RTOS, and if that did much of the work the kernel does. A modern PC is already like a mini heterogeneous supercomputer. Put the GUI on a core on the GPU card, so the CPU can send basic instructions and data (what they're moving towards anyway, but stick the windowing system the other end of the pcie bus, next to the GPU, possibly in the screen. Do likewise for io, network, and audio. Economies of scale is how the price is kept low. The trend has been to lump more and more work on faster and faster CPUs. Now that CPUs are no longer increasing in single core speed as they once did, performance gains will come from not using a 95W intel chip for what can be done just as well on a 1W ARM or MIPs chip. As for verifying security, use public key crypto, signiatures and hashing
to verify what us run (optionally), and separate OS install and normal runtime at a hardware level: have a small SSD for the core OS files (2GB would be plenty for a number of OSs side by side). In OS install mode, you can copy the files across, and do hardware diagnostics etc., but not run normal user software like Firefox. In normal run mode, the switch engages a hardware write blocker to the small OS SSD, and in signed mode the image needs to be signed by the hardware vendor somehow. Then malware cannot corrupt your OS as happens so often.
John_Chalisque
Is secret chip in Mr. Putin's head.
Is why all three major classes of CPUs have essentially the same 'Management Engine' design, and why all allow obscure said management engine's operations from the end user of the hardware.
ARM Trustzone(Arm core), Intel's ME(Arc core), and AMD's Trustzone core(Arm again)/System Management Unit (LM32):
Of these the latest versions of each support a permanent signing key, disallowing the end user from customizing, disabling, or auditing the software and operation of the most critical component of their online lives. And face it, unless you live out in the sticks in an off-grid community, your life *IS* plugged in. And now you're giving the keys to the kingdom to, if you're lucky, a bunch of slightly paranoid corporations who at least for now wouldn't abuse the privilege... And if you are unlucky, you are giving those keys not only to those corporations, but also to any social engineer, spy, law enforcement, or corporate espionage agent willing to invest the time, political leverage, or skill to retrieve the key. At which point all of that old hardware may be susceptable to a level of observation that would give even Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un stiffies that even their no doubt plentiful hordes of mistresses couldn't bring down.
In other news: Kim Jong-un was killed by a female suicide bomber. google 'North Korea Leader' on google and it should be the first hit!
A lot of the modern Intel processors were designed in Israel. If you aren't concerned with the FBI/NSA, what about Mossad? How about MI5/6/FBI/NSA via Intelligence sharing with Mossad?
Honestly the real question that should be asked nowadays is: With all of our devices backdoored to this extent, how come there are still terrorist attacks in first world countries other than because they are politically beneficial to societal, legal, and financial changes?
talking about his University.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck....
It's probably Donald Duck.
Which has been there since the 486(SL, or 386SL?). The Intel Management Engine, as mentioned has only been there since the Q35 chipset era, earlier equivalents were generally KNC/BMI/IPMI(Might be wrong about the first two acronyms, it's been years) interfaces and involved a secondary cpu board with a management processor on it which simply got a special header and possibly modified PCI slot to allow access to the CPU bus. Furthermore power management capabilities were only available with ATX power supplies (I have some proto-ATX systems that predated them, but had BMI interfaces on them.)
So it can be hacked.
Come on!! How can that even count as a "response"? The TFA just reiterate the original article, but punctuating it by the author's unexplainable hate for anything open,and at the very bottom, it quotes an "Intel Spokesman" in a few lines just saying "it is very secure".
All right! I feel safer already!
-><- no
> The chip has the "power" to do many things including take secret control of a system, transfer files, read RAM, anything.
Not with properly configured IOMMU tables it doesn't.
Of course your PC is still on even when it's off. It's called 'standby' and is used for a number of things - like being able to start it up using a touch button rather than a big honkin' switch. Most power supplies have a switch on the back that actually shuts it all off - useful if you're going to be messing about inside though pulling the plug is better. Also, you can hook it up to a UPS if it's a desktop, and turning it off at the UPS turns it OFF much like that switch on the p/s. If the computer is sitting there in standby anyway, having the 'management engine' still running probably doesn't increase the power draw much. You can't spin up a disk drive on standby power, so unless it's actually turning the system on without your knowledge (isn't there a setting for that in the BIOS?) there's not much it can do while on standby.
What does it monitor when the computer's actually on? Talk to Intel. And as far as using the same network connection as the main system ... now many connections do you have? Most computers only HAVE one so any communication goes through that.
Clickbait.
Andy Patrizio is a stupid idiot of a jounalist who knows nothing about computers and security.
"An Intel spokesperson told the publication: While the Intel Management Engine is proprietary and Intel does not share the source code, it is very secure. Intel has a defined set of policies and procedures, managed by a dedicated team, to actively monitor and respond to vulnerabilities identified in released products. In the case of the Intel Management Engine, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise. But WE'RE using it as a back door. I mean come on."
> namely, if it can be compromised by a rootkit
It fucking IS a rootkit.
Christ.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
The point isn't that its on when the system is off. The point is what it can do to the host system when its on. It can read RAM. It can communicate over the network. Its completely beyond the control or purview of the host operating system.
What does it monitor when the computer's actually on? Talk to Intel.
The point being that if it can be exploited, then its at the mercy of hackers. So you can run OpenBSD or whatever you like, and if the ME is exploitable someone can remotely connect to your system, keylog it, rootkit it, read out the contents of ram...
Its fundamentally incompatible with a secure system; to have a 'black box' OS that can do anything it wants and may have all kinds of weaknesses and exploits and then have that piggy-backing on the host systems network interface.
On servers, where its relegated to a dedicated wired port... and the people running them are running the management over separate secure networks... it makes sense.
But WTF is this doing on wifi on laptops?
Thats your problem there, thinking your attacker will use methods you expect.
e.g What if Intel decide to be the attacker ?
Sure Intel can upgrade their reference firmwares, but the sprawling mess of motherboard manufacturers are not really interested in updating firmwares. Maybe for the latest generation but certainly not for anything over four years old.
I even have a Lenovo desktop that has insecure (default password you can't disable, way to go Intel) AMT and the instructions from Lenovo just tell to muggle up the IP address so it couldn't be accessed.
You're not allowed to tell us? I rest my case.
An Intel spokesperson told the publication: While the Intel Management Engine is proprietary and Intel does not share the source code, it is very secure. Intel has a defined set of policies and procedures, managed by a dedicated team, to actively monitor and respond to vulnerabilities identified in released products. In the case of the Intel Management Engine, there are mechanisms in place to address vulnerabilities should the need arise.
> If not, my next buy is AMD...
I could call this the "God's key".
As we know nothing about how this work inside, there are two big possibilities: (1) There is only one key for every Intel chip or (2) Intel stores private keys for every chip they produce. And both are equally fragile.
In the first place, that key must be in the hands of somebody in some moment in the CPU life cycle, or the key must be stored someplace and somebody must has a key to access the key, or any other combination of facts involving a human. As the weakest link, that human is the one must be protected.
In the second place, if there is only one key to have access to the most of Intel based computers around, then it deserves to invest in a methodology to break "that" key. The payment always will be higher than the money used to break it.
Also, when we talk about hundreds of years to break a key, that is a commercial buzzword referring to a "maximum" in the statistical world. There is a chance that the key be found in just five minutes so, to declare the type of key is not a good idea because they already gave enough information for somebody to try to break it.
But there is a particularly troublesome word has been used here. It is the "VERY" in "very secure". For me, something is or not secure and when very is used, it means that they don't trust 100% on what they do. There is a manageable risk that they decide to put into their shoulders in the name of all their users without having any idea what their users would be controlling with their CPUs. And this is a "very" risky bid.
Is this thing required to be operational for the rest of the motherboard to function? I mean, if I get careless with a wandering soldering iron and happen to melty-burny-ize the chip this thing is on, is the entire board bricked or is it business as usual from my end of things, less one AMT engine?
Doesn't anyone read Slashdot? manishs, who made this post, posted the same story, with the same links, on June 15: Intel x86s Hide Another CPU That Can Take Over Your Machine -- You Can't Audit it.
And, the check is in the mail...
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Again, how would you know what to block?
Even if you knew what to block, how would your firewall ever see it? If you built it out of Intel chips, AMD's ME gets first look at them. It could recognize its own, see that they're for something behind it, and forward them itself, without the main CPU ever seeing them. Even if there are multiple cards involved the MEs get to talk to each other in private.
The same applies to outgoing packets from the advertised "M.E. Phone Home" feature on machines behind your firewall. A firewall's rules and logging don't mean squat when the firmware on the hardware under the firewall's processor intercept and forward the packets themselves and don't bother to mention it to their victim.
It might seem hard to do but it's actually pretty trivial. The M.E. already knows how to intercept packets for itself and establish a connection from an external controller. All it has to do in addition is provide that service on inward-facing interfaces as well, and proxy between them and similar connections on the outward-facing interfaces. Piece of cake.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm afraid you used wrong tense.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
> Again, how would you know what to block?
You're asking the wrong question. You block everything, default deny. The question is, how long will it take you to turn on just the things you need?
And of course, I'm not suggesting that you personally need to do this. But the fact is, there's plenty of machines that operate under this model, which definitely reduces the risk of this potential attack. It doesn't eliminate it, however.
> If you built it out of Intel chips
I do mention this. But firewalls are not always built out of Intel chips, and they are definitely not all built out of the ones with ME built in. Firewalls don't need to even be running x86 stuff normally either- there's a great deal of diversity in these solutions.
> A firewall's rules and logging don't mean squat when the firmware on the hardware under the firewall's processor intercept and forward the packets themselves and don't bother to mention it to their victim.
Again, if this was happening it would have been noticed. There's fully open hardware in the firewall arena. If a hardware firewall exists that secretly passes certain packets from WAN to LAN, that's a serious violation, and possibly even a criminal one. If you are saying that you can't trust the software firewall on your machine because the ME could issue packets raw on the LAN, yes, of course that is an issue. But a software firewall is never good enough alone, as Microsoft proved by shoving packets in and out that ignore admin configured networking.
Again, the ME is a risk- definitely- but there are possible mitigations for an ME bug (or backdoor) that you can take today, and they happen to be the same mitigations you are already doing for all the other potential risks.
If you don't know what is in any of the other chips, or even what is in the rest of that chip, then worrying about one extra block that you can't even prove is there, is wasted effort. 8-P
Remember when GCHQ demanded Guardian staffers destroy very specific locations on the laptop motherboards? Hmm.
Your Bios/EFI...
Your video/graphics cards...
Raid adaptors...
Modems...
Hard drives...
optical disc drives...
thumb drives...
webcams...
your mouse...
your keyboard...
even your monitor thanks to today's 2 way communication standards ala HDMI.
Have you seen the source to ANY of these devices firmware?