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How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

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Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#41

Post by Spooky23 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #26
spydum wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps everyone who finds something disappears? seriously, AMT is stuff of nightmares. runs even when machine is powered off.

AMT is the reason I mock anyone here that talks about concerns of backdoors in Intel's RNG's being ridiculous. The whole CPU is backdoored with a backdoor that can run when it's off . Including probably the RNG given debug wires are probably connected to it. Let's not worry about one feature when we have a subversion this big. Biggest irony: they advertise it as a feature for IT management. ;)

My team spent a bunch of time looking at AMT as a management tool -- it adds lots of complexity and accomplishes almost nothing that cannot be done easier a half dozen other ways. The only functionality we saw any real use for was an always on VPN and remote wake up where networks block WoL.

The other thing that's even stranger is Absolute Software, a little company nobody has ever heard of who somehow got every OEM to bundle their code in system BIOS for theft recovery since the 90s.

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#42

Post by Animats »

woodman wrote: post #30
incompatible wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firewalling ports for incoming connections and IP addresses for outgoing, I should say.

Just be mindful of the fact that you've only increased the difficulty of an attack, the vulnerability still exists. I've got a lenovo that regularly sends out dhcp broadcasts, despite no dhcp code being on disk - it could just as easily call home with dns (sending recursive requests to the same ip as the last successful user initiated query). The only way to fix a ring -N rootkit is to remove ring -N.

It would be useful to boot the machine with FreeDOS (which has no networking code) and see what, if anything, comes out the Ethernet port.

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#43

Post by mappu »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #27
snaky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of users are comfortable with status quo. Therefore anyone who would implement and sell their own modern CPU with no 'features' like ME, would sell it by premium price - at least, due the much less target audience - and that will lead to audience shrink yet much more.

That's exactly what happened almost every time. Another commenter posted a link to OSS CPU's. Two, LEON3 and SPARCT1/T2, are great CPU's released under GPL. Gaisler had a lot of other I.P. to go with LEON3. Now, tell me what FOSS loving companies brought those to market or have a board to sell me? Anyone? Bueller?

The Talos Secure Workstation is a libre POWER8. https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

Benchmarks: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wor...

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#44

Post by markokrajnc »

tk32 wrote: post #38
niels_olson wrote: post #4

So ... is my macbook or Dell server pre-pwned by Intel and re-pwned by the Chinese? What, exactly, am I supposed to be afraid of here?

Nothing, as long as you have nothing to hide. :-)

So if you have business secrets, you will have worries... :-)

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#45

Post by yoo1I »

incompatible wrote: post #7

How about firewalling whatever ports the Intel code may use? If it can't communicate with the Internet, presumably it's not likely to do any harm.

That only works for very simple surveillance. It has complete control over your hardware, and it can encode information that it wants to get off of the system in a variety of different ways.

If you want to firewall ports or IP addresses on the machine itself, obviously that doesn't do anything, so what you'd need to do is do it on your router (that you hope doesn't have a similar backdoor that cooperates with ME), first you'd need to know what to block, which is difficult enough, and then you'd have to trust that that information doesn't change.

But event then all it takes is for AWS or CloudFlare or $Foo to collude with Intel to get at your juicy data again, so you really would need to work on a blocked-by-default basis, which is possible, but not really practical, depending on what you're doing.

It really depends on what your threat model is. If your're a high value target to someone with a lot of resources, you're essentially screwed.

It can broadcast information via your speakers, and maybe even your microphone. It can encode data in the timing of your packets as they leave your system. It can encode data in it's power consumption, it can encode data in what it sends to the screen, it can send data out via bluetooth or wifi. There are probably more ways, that I didn't think of off the top of my head.

We have Free Software all the way down to the firmware level. Not widely available, but the potential is there. That is good.

But for computers that we can really trust, we need to go deeper.

looks up Czochralski process

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#46

Post by woodman »

Animats wrote: post #42
woodman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just be mindful of the fact that you've only increased the difficulty of an attack, the vulnerability still exists. I've got a lenovo that regularly sends out dhcp broadcasts, despite no dhcp code being on disk - it could just as easily call home with dns (sending recursive requests to the same ip as the last successful user initiated query). The only way to fix a ring -N rootkit is to remove ring -N.

It would be useful to boot the machine with FreeDOS (which has no networking code) and see what, if anything, comes out the Ethernet port.

No need, everything is compiled from source, no dhcp to be found, and the kernel's network stack shows no traffic - but the switch does. It is no secret that Intel ME does whatever it wants with the ethernet port.

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#47

Post by nickpsecurity »

mappu wrote: post #43
nickpsecurity wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what happened almost every time. Another commenter posted a link to OSS CPU's. Two, LEON3 and SPARCT1/T2, are great CPU's released under GPL. Gaisler had a lot of other I.P. to go with LEON3. Now, tell me what FOSS loving companies brought those to market or have a board to sell me? Anyone? Bueller?

The Talos Secure Workstation is a libre POWER8. https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php Benchmarks: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wor...

Where can I get the full source of POWER8 under GPL or another free license? I thought they were licensing it for money. I'm not sure if it's behavioral or RTL either that they provide. I know very little of it whereas I can download Leon or OpenSPARC of their web sites. I'd go with a version of Leon given Oracle is so sue happy.

Re: How to become the sole owner of your PC [pdf]

#49

Post by marssaxman »

gcb0 wrote: post #37
pjlegato wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem to be solved here is not just software. How do you beat the economies of scale that standard designs have achieved? For most applications, the end user gets vastly more computing power per dollar spent when they buy an off the shelf design that's in large scale mass production. You could port BSD or Linux to your new architecture for a reasonable amount of money (though that's already an uphill battle sel…

do you need 40ghz with 32 cores or 2 cores at 1.5ghz and the garantee of full control? for personal computing, I'd take the later

By far the latter. My computation needs have been satisfied for years now; paternalistic, insecure platform lock-in crap irritates me far more than access to cutting-edge technology would benefit me.
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