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I think this is time for AMD or IBM's POWER8/9 to step in. If anything a little good PR vis-a-vis the "rootkit nightmare waiting to happen in your server" would be nice.
https://raptorengineering.com/TALOS/op_twbx86.php
https://static.rpteng.com/TALOS/assets/the_world_beyond_x86....
Strange that Intel gives people more reason to go to other processors like ARM when Intel is under such pressure from competition.
In the corporation centers, nobody thinks of critical users that look very carefully on things. They mostly think about the average user, that just wants more "power".
Strange that Intel gives people more reason to go to other processors like ARM when Intel is under such pressure from competition.
You could make the case that this might convince people to use AMD CPUs, but from what I hear AMD has all the same issues with worse performance to boot.
I think this is time for AMD or IBM's POWER8/9 to step in. If anything a little good PR vis-a-vis the "rootkit nightmare waiting to happen in your server" would be nice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's impossible to "reverse-engineer" a cryptographic signature. Properly implemented (and you can bet that Intel has had time to finalize this) it's computationally insurmountable.
just like how DVD Encryption ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System ) was never reverse engineered because the key was too difficult to crack ?
If it's using 2048-bit RSA, that's perhaps equivalent to a 256-bit private key.
So entirely different ballpark to CSS.
Igor Skochinsky (of IDA Hex-Rays fame, among others) has been studying Intel ME for quite some time. He gave a nice talk at Breakpoint summarizing what he'd discovered (slides here [pdf]: https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/blob/master/2014-10%20%... ). Among other things, he finds that ME is capable of running signed Java code which is pushed to the device. Due to the complexity and size of the Java code, it's quit…
How much firmware is in the thing? Is there a whole JVM in there? An OS? That's a lot of attack surface.
It may be, that Intel didn't plan this as an NSA/XYZ back door - but it doesn't actually matter. What matters is that we know 1) Intel has such technology implemented in allmost all desktops/servers currently running 2) you can access those machines remotely (even over GSM) and perform reads/writes. Example misuse: somebody can put illegal stuff on your machine and then sue you... (Intel has marketed this feature for…
Ever wondered why Google is working on their own CPU?
Taking another angle: What if the computer's owner wants to use it to access her computer remotely? Are there some instructions how to do this? Is it feasible? If not, then there seems little justification to have a relatively new feature like this turned on by default. Who is this feature really for? If it's not for all users then why is activation mandatory in CPUs after Core2? I mean, if ME has to be active, then…
It's marketed as Intel vPro. Pricing is probably typical enterprise level. This page has more details: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...