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Can Intel's 'Management Engine' Be Repurposed?
Long-time Slashdot reader iamacat writes:
Not a day goes by without a story about another Intel Management Engine vulnerability. What I get is that a lot of consumer PCs can access network and run x86 code on top of UNIX-like OS such as Minix even when powered off.
This sounds pretty useful for tasks such as running an occasional use Plex server. Like I can have a box that draws very little power when idle. But when an incoming connection is detected, it can power itself and the media drive on and serve the requested content.
The original submission ends with an interesting question. "if Intel ME is so insecure, how do I exploit it for practically useful purposes?"
This sounds pretty useful for tasks such as running an occasional use Plex server. Like I can have a box that draws very little power when idle. But when an incoming connection is detected, it can power itself and the media drive on and serve the requested content.
The original submission ends with an interesting question. "if Intel ME is so insecure, how do I exploit it for practically useful purposes?"
The submission is confusing because the author proposes "repurposing" the ME, but the example is something that it what it is intended for in the first place. Back when it was first introduced, I worked for a company that created a program that would wake a remote computer on demand and run a few sundry tasks: a defrag and a backup. Intel partnered with various software vendors to create demos of what ME could do. And heck, even without ME, most network cards have a wake-on-LAN feature anyway.
Intel clearly didn't do a good job marketing the feature if nobody thought of how to use it until a vulnerability was found in it.
The Intel ME (I think) was a combination Light Out mangement management engine and a VNC server, basically IPMI over IP with a remote console.
It wasn't that secret as I recall it started with something like the P68 chipset on Intel motherboards and was ubiquitous, the weird path to obscurity was when they tried to monetize and license it..
The best thing Intel could do today would be to fully document and open it up. People would probably choose to either disable it, or more probably add-on a seperate ethernet card for secure traffic, and reserve the built-in NIC for management activities like on HP servers with its iLO interface.. they also had a "shared" mode stealing interstitial ethernet CDMA intervals to virtualize two seperate Ethernet MAC addresses on the same physical hardware.. duty cycle something like 80/20 but they had the lesson learned to also make it disabled and use (only) a seperate add-on interface connected to different pins on the motherboard, for 100/100 across two different NIC interfaces for practical reasons. Ironically it all started with the Gas and Oil industry, Exxon back in the days when they wanted remote mangement on their servers.. in pre-HP Compaq days.. Intel saw that and wanted some of that business.. so it crept into the base designs later.. without a lot of thought.. which has come home to roost