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Intel Security Releases Detection Tool For EFI Rootkits After CIA Leak (pcworld.com)
After WikiLeaks revealed data exposing information about the CIA's arsenal of hacking tools, Intel Security has released a tool that allows users to check if their computer's low-level system firmware has been modified and contains unauthorized code. PCWorld reports: The release comes after CIA documents leaked Tuesday revealed that the agency has developed EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) rootkits for Apple's Macbooks. The documents from CIA's Embedded Development Branch (EDB) mention an OS X "implant" called DerStarke that includes a kernel code injection module dubbed Bokor and an EFI persistence module called DarkMatter. In addition to DarkMatter, there is a second project in the CIA EDB documents called QuarkMatter that is also described as a "Mac OS X EFI implant which uses an EFI driver stored on the EFI system partition to provide persistence to an arbitrary kernel implant." The Advanced Threat Research team at Intel Security has created a new module for its existing CHIPSEC open-source framework to detect rogue EFI binaries. CHIPSEC consists of a set of command-line tools that use low-level interfaces to analyze a system's hardware, firmware, and platform components. It can be run from Windows, Linux, macOS, and even from an EFI shell. The new CHIPSEC module allows the user to take a clean EFI image from the computer manufacturer, extract its contents and build a whitelist of the binary files inside. It can then compare that list against the system's current EFI or against an EFI image previously extracted from a system.
when Intel builds a separate computing environment into their processors and chipsets, designed to operate out of control or view of the user, and then offers this EFI rootkit detection tool? Can you trust Intel?
Intel already has a backdoor called "Intel Management Engine Interface" that can't be disabled, even if you disable Windows drivers or run Linux, it's built into the BIOS that cannot be disabled.
The UEFI/EFI itself is another layer of bullshit that makes it such a hassle to dual-boot or run non-windows OS. Try installing Linux Mint on an HP laptop and even the latest version requires you to log into the UEFI partition and rename/move the image file just so you can get grub to show up during boot (without hitting hot keys).
How do I know that Intel's utility's not going to replace it with the Microsoft version in the name of "security"?
How do I know your replacement image, if that's how it works - is not going to be Intel's compromised BS that allows even more access than the fucking Intel Management engine?
Don't blame Intel for the constant problems of ACPI. It was a good design, as initially envisioned.
Blame Microsoft. The Windows ACPI support is really, really awful, but every non-server motherboard is designed and tested for windows - linux testing is an afterthought, if at all. Same for laptops. An ACPI implementation designed and tested for Windows is likely to go very wrong if confronted with an OS that actually does ACPI properly. A common problem is invalid values in those ACPI tables (Probably why the above poster was fiddling with them) - Windows ignores a few values, and just assumes defaults, so some mainboards and laptops pass testing on Windows even though the wrong values or just all-zeros are written in. When linux reads and tries to act on those tables, it usually hangs the system.
My own desktop has an issue something like that, which I got around by just putting 'acpi=off' on the kernel options.