Intel's Remote Hijacking Flaw Was 'Worse Than Anyone Thought' (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: A remote hijacking flaw that lurked in Intel chips for seven years was more severe than many people imagined, because it allowed hackers to remotely gain administrative control over huge fleets of computers without entering a password. This is according to technical analyses published Friday... AMT makes it possible to log into a computer and exercise the same control enjoyed by administrators with physical access [and] was set up to require a password before it could be remotely accessed over a Web browser interface. But, remarkably, that authentication mechanism can be bypassed by entering any text string -- or no text at all...

"Authentication still worked" even when the wrong hash was entered, Tenable Director of Reverse Engineering Carlos Perez wrote. "We had discovered a complete bypass of the authentication scheme." A separate technical analysis from Embedi, the security firm Intel credited with first disclosing the vulnerability, arrived at the same conclusion... Making matters worse, unauthorized accesses typically aren't logged by the PC because AMT has direct access to the computer's network hardware... The packets bypass the OS completely.
The article adds that Intel officials "said they expect PC makers to release a patch next week." And in the meantime? "Intel is urging customers to download and run this discovery tool to diagnose potentially vulnerable computers."

Saturday Ars Technica found more than 8,500 systems with an AMT interface exposed to the internet using the Shodan search engine -- over 2,000 in the United States -- adding that "many others may be accessible via organizational networks."

Comments

Re:Predictable outcome

[Dogtanian]

Putting Internet accessible code running over the operating system was a terrible idea and this is the predictable outcome.

Coincidentally, around six weeks back, I bookmarked this article, originally written in 2016. Notably, it says that:-

Five or so years ago, Intel rolled out something horrible. Intel’s Management Engine (ME) is a completely separate computing environment running on Intel chipsets that has access to everything. The ME has network access, access to the host operating system, memory, and cryptography engine. The ME can be used remotely even if the PC is powered off. If that sounds scary, it gets even worse: no one knows what the ME is doing, and we can’t even look at the code. When — not ‘if’ — the ME is finally cracked open, every computer running on a recent Intel chip will have a huge security and privacy issue. Intel’s Management Engine is the single most dangerous piece of computer hardware ever created.

Pedantry; it doesn't appear to be on every Intel chip, only those with vPro enabled(?) Still a horrible idea.

Re: Dear Intel

[mikael]

This is what all backdoors look like. "Ooops, we accidently encrypt and decrypt the password and write it out at the end of the file". "Whoops, we missed out a break statement in the selection of the encryption algorithm, it always defaults to the legacy easily broken encryption method". "Oh, shooot, we forget to add the menu option to the router to filter out multicasts, anyone can send a SSDP multicast to that address and get a list of hosts returned."

Like Microsoft's Windows OS firewall doesn't allow blocking of Microsoft telemetry servers. Wonder why? What could be so harmful in blocking a data stream of a few hundred bytes/second?

Lack of negative testing - extremely common

[raymorris]

This much more common mistake than one might think. A *lot* of applications will accept an empty password. It's one of the more common of the 90,000 or so vulnerabilities that we test for.

Programmers get so focused on making things work, 95% of the testing they do is geared toward that, toward doing whatever is supposed be used for, given correct input. They forget to test the negative - what does it do with incorrect input? If a program retrieves a web page, what if it's empty? What does a searching or sorting program do when asked to aort or search an empty list, or a list of just one item? That stuff doesn't get tested much.

Re:I don't think you know what that word means.

[smallfries]

You know that Intel processors without AMT still have the capability but it is disabled in software...