Security Leftovers
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Intel's zero-day problem
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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.
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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.
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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.
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OSS-Fuzz: Five months later, and rewarding projects
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USN-3285-1: LightDM vulnerability
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generic kde LPE
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QSB #30: Critical Xen bugs related to PV memory virtualization (XSA-213, XSA-214)
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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.
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