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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Intel's zero-day problem
  • Reverse-engineering the Intel Management Engine’s ROMP module

    Last month, while I was waiting for hardware to arrive and undergo troubleshooting, I had some spare time to begin some Intel ME reverse engineering work.

    First, I need to give some shout out to Igor Skochinsky, a Hex-Rays developer, who had been working on reverse engineering the Intel ME for a while, and who has been very generous in sharing his notes and research on the ME with us, which is going to be a huge help and cut down months of reverse engineering and guesswork. Igor was very helpful in getting me to understand the bits that didn’t make sense to me.

  • Intel AMT on wireless networks

    More details about Intel's AMT vulnerablity have been released - it's about the worst case scenario, in that it's a total authentication bypass that appears to exist independent of whether the AMT is being used in Small Business or Enterprise modes (more background in my previous post here). One thing I claimed was that even though this was pretty bad it probably wasn't super bad, since Shodan indicated that there were only a small number of thousand machines on the public internet and accessible via AMT. Most deployments were probably behind corporate firewalls, which meant that it was plausibly a vector for spreading within a company but probably wasn't a likely initial vector.

    [...]

    Case 2 is the scary one. If you have a laptop that supports AMT, and if AMT has been provisioned, and if AMT has had wireless support turned on, and if you're running Windows, then connecting your laptop to a public wireless network means that AMT is accessible to anyone else on that network[1]. If it hasn't received a firmware update, they'll be able to do so without needing any valid credentials.

  • Intel declared war on general purpose computing and lost, so now all our computers are broken

    It's been a year since we warned that Intel's Management Engine -- a separate computer within your own computer, intended to verify and supervise the main system -- presented a terrifying, unauditable security risk that could lead to devastating, unstoppable attacks. Guess what happened next?

    For the past week, the IT press has been full of news about the AMT module in the Management Engine making millions of systems vulnerable to local and remote attacks, with a firmware update to disable the module as the only really comprehensive solution. But AMT is only one of the many components of ME, and every one of them could have a vulnerability as grave as this one -- and Intel is not offering any way to turn off ME altogether, meaning that there's a lot of this in our future.

    ME is a brilliant example of why declaring war on general-purpose computing is a terrible idea. There are lots of reasons to want a computer that can only run some programs (instead of every program): preventing poisoned operating systems and other malware, preventing game cheating, enforcing copyright restrictions (DRM), etc... Every one of them is presented as a use-case for ME.

  • OSS-Fuzz: Five months later, and rewarding projects
  • USN-3285-1: LightDM vulnerability
  • generic kde LPE
  • QSB #30: Critical Xen bugs related to PV memory virtualization (XSA-213, XSA-214)
  • Europe is living under Microsoft’s digital killswitch

    All across Europe, from Finland to Portugal, Ireland to Greece, governments rely on Microsoft software. As their digital systems grow in size and importance, countries are becoming increasingly dependent on this single American corporation. But what consequences does this “lock-in” have? What risks does it pose for the security of European data? And what can governments do to counter it?

    It’s estimated that Microsoft makes around two billion euros in Europe every year, just from its business with the public sector. In 2012 the European Commission released a report that stated that 1.1 billion euros were unnecessarily lost by the European public sector due to being locked-in in business with IT system providers.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.