Security: Intel Management Engine (ME), Snyk FUD, and Latest Security Updates
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Replacing x86 firmware with Linux and Go
The Intel Management Engine (ME), which is a separate processor and operating system running outside of user control on most x86 systems, has long been of concern to users who are security and privacy conscious. Google and others have been working on ways to eliminate as much of that functionality as possible (while still being able to boot and run the system). Ronald Minnich from Google came to Prague to talk about those efforts at the 2017 Embedded Linux Conference Europe.
He began by noting that most times he is talking about firmware, it is with his coreboot hat on. But he removed said "very nice hat", since his talk was "not a coreboot talk". He listed a number of people who had worked on the project to "replace your exploit-ridden firmware with a Linux kernel", including several from partner companies (Two Sigma, Cisco, and Horizon Computing) as well as several other Google employees.
The results they achieved were to drop the boot time on an Open Compute Project (OCP) node from eight minutes to 20 seconds. To his way of thinking, that is "maybe the single least important part" of this work, he said. All of the user-space parts of the boot process are written in Go; that includes everything in initramfs, including init. This brings Linux performance, reliability, and security to the boot process and they were able to eliminate all of the ME and UEFI post-boot activity from the boot process.
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Interview: Why are open-source security vulnerabilities rising? [Ed: Snyk is a FUD firm. It has been smearing Free software a lot lately in an effort to just sell its services.]
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Security updates for Wednesday
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