An in-depth security review of the Intel Management Engine

Good times when kernel privilege escalation was the worst you had to fear.

I'm not familiar enough with the Intel ME to tell, but could this possibly be exploited with the arbitrary code execution in the ME being used to set the HAP bit without requiring hardware intervention?

So, will Intel be patching both the vulnerabilities and the kludges people have found to remove ME? Thus making some customers safer while maintaining systemic risk for everyone?

"Asking for a friend"

Technically speaking, that is a security vulnerability. So it wouldn't surprise me.

Wow all 6th, 7th and 8th gen are all vulnerable along with a bunch of Xeon processors. Even the laptop I am typing this on is vulnerable, this is going to be messy. Plus all the fun vulnerabilities like arbitrary code execution, unauthorized access to privileged content. These must be related to the blackhat talk coming up in December about hacking a turned-off computer and running unsigned code on ME [0]. Yep and the two researches doing the talk are the two people credited in this announcement, Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy. Great work by them finding these vulnerabilities and disclosing them, these are the kind of vulnerabilities that the NSA would salivate over.

I wonder if this will at all dissuade either Intel or AMD into continuing to make these super privileged processors whose functions are completely hidden. The cynic in me thinks that this will change absolutely nothing.

There is a great website called The Bad Thing [1] that has compiled the known information about Intel ME.

I just ran the detection tool on my laptop and I am running a vulnerable version of Intel ME, but I can't even do anything about it until my system manufacturer provides a patch for it. I feel like this is going to be one of those situations that ends up leaving millions of devices unpatched and vulnerable a few years down the road.

[0]: https://www.blackhat.com/eu-17/briefings/schedule/#how-to-ha... [1]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~davide/bad_thing.html

Wow, just imagine what this means to cloud, you get to own not one server of an org... but several orgs at the same time!