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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]

#61

Post by woodman »

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. ;)

I'd argue that a factory backdoored RNG would be infinitely more dangerous. An AMT exploit wouldn't be passive, and it wouldn't weaken every crypto operation proceeding the time of the attack. Between the two, which do you think an entity with a massive surveillance network, and a history of intentionally weakening security infrastructure, would prefer?

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

#62

Post by technomancy »

dingle_thunk wrote: post #39

Seems like if I really want to know what's going on at that level, I should really use something more simple, like a raspberry pi...

Why would you switch to a system that relies on NDA-protected chips when there are free ones available like the BeagleBone?

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

#63

Post by kriro »

There's always the non x86 path.

I have recently purchased a pi-top which is basically a 3d-printed laptop case + laptop battery + keyboard + display + raspberry pi 3. The keyboard could be better and I'll swap out the pi for a beagle bone black (pi comes with a binary blob) but it's a surprisingly useful package. I only bought it to experiment a bit with ARM assembly on the go but it's actually powerful enough for a lot of day to day stuff (mail, surfing, libre office, programming). Not great but good enough.

Of course you have to be willing to trade speed and availability of some programs for that control but in theory a beagle bone + input and output devices is a nice little open machine for a lot of day to day stuff.

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

#64

Post by 13of40 »

userbinator wrote: post #21

30 years ago you could buy an IBM PC/AT and it would come with schematics, detailed programming information, and the complete source code listing for the BIOS[1]. There wasn't really anything "hidden", and you really felt like "the sole owner of your PC". The PC became the dominant platform because of this. Now, because of corporate interests[2][3], much of it is officially under a thick layer of red-tape NDAs, and w…

> they really intended it to be a backdoor-ish sort of thing

Occam's razor says they really just sell a ton of CPUs to huge datacenters and wanted to solve the problem of having to have some tech go out and physically reset a machine when it misbehaves. If you've ever accidentally powered down a machine that's sitting in some lights-out facility in Northern Alabraska, this kind of technology is a godsend. Now I'm not saying I'd bet my hat that it's 100% secure, or that Intel couldn't be thumb-screwed by the feds to use it as a backdoor in some scenario, but it wasn't built from the ground up to be one.

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

#65

Post by sidhu1f »

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?

Well, as per the coreboot docs [1], the panic level is only 9000+...

[1] https://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation#Intel

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

#66

Post by notalaser »

kriro wrote: post #63

There's always the non x86 path. I have recently purchased a pi-top which is basically a 3d-printed laptop case + laptop battery + keyboard + display + raspberry pi 3. The keyboard could be better and I'll swap out the pi for a beagle bone black (pi comes with a binary blob) but it's a surprisingly useful package. I only bought it to experiment a bit with ARM assembly on the go but it's actually powerful enough for a…

ARM isn't a lot better. It helps that the (relatively simple) boards have the schematics available, but most platforms require binary blobs and there are few of them that don't have a bunch of useful information tucked away behind a gazillion NDAs.

The various warts in the implementation (e.g. no BIOS, so there's quite some effort going just into making something boot on a new ARM board) and the non-standard, or just closed source-dependent, augmentations that are required in order to make an ARM CPU do anything breathtaking (PowerVR and Mali, TI's EVEs) also mean that, at least if you're using Linux, you're often living outside the mainline kernel. I have very few kind words to say about some of the code that I've seen in manufacturers' kernel trees, especially on let's-pump-two-more-cores-before-next-years-mobile-world-so-that-we-can-play-a-demo-that-looks-exactly-like-last-year-except-salespeople-are-gasping-for-some-reason, the ancient Indian name by which ARM is also known in some places. I would rather not have useful/important data reside on devices which run that stuff.

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

#67

Post by zeta0134 »

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

For my actual day to day work? The latter, by far. I can get nearly all of my computing done comfortably on a raspberry pi. Most of what I need to do involves remote terminals via SSH, which I can run on any toaster.

I do own a desktop gaming PC though. It's running Windows 10 on a respectable Intel CPU with a highish end nVidia graphics card. On it are my games. On it are only my games. If I need to do any development work, I boot that machine into Arch Linux. That's partly because I don't trust Windows, but it's mostly because the development environment is better on a Linux system anyway, for what I do regularly.

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

#69

Post by ragix »

13of40 wrote: post #64
userbinator wrote: post #21

30 years ago you could buy an IBM PC/AT and it would come with schematics, detailed programming information, and the complete source code listing for the BIOS[1]. There wasn't really anything "hidden", and you really felt like "the sole owner of your PC". The PC became the dominant platform because of this. Now, because of corporate interests[2][3], much of it is officially under a thick layer of red-tape NDAs, and w…

> they really intended it to be a backdoor-ish sort of thing Occam's razor says they really just sell a ton of CPUs to huge datacenters and wanted to solve the problem of having to have some tech go out and physically reset a machine when it misbehaves. If you've ever accidentally powered down a machine that's sitting in some lights-out facility in Northern Alabraska, this kind of technology is a godsend. Now I'm not…

I agree with you on this one. I just see it as in band lights out management.

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

#70

Post by ragix »

13of40 wrote: post #64
userbinator wrote: post #21

30 years ago you could buy an IBM PC/AT and it would come with schematics, detailed programming information, and the complete source code listing for the BIOS[1]. There wasn't really anything "hidden", and you really felt like "the sole owner of your PC". The PC became the dominant platform because of this. Now, because of corporate interests[2][3], much of it is officially under a thick layer of red-tape NDAs, and w…

> they really intended it to be a backdoor-ish sort of thing Occam's razor says they really just sell a ton of CPUs to huge datacenters and wanted to solve the problem of having to have some tech go out and physically reset a machine when it misbehaves. If you've ever accidentally powered down a machine that's sitting in some lights-out facility in Northern Alabraska, this kind of technology is a godsend. Now I'm not…

I agree with you on this one. I just see it as in band lights out management.
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