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- It's a logic bug (authentication bypass) instead of a memory corruption. An authentication bypass is bad, but a full compromise would have been much worse.
- It's a bug in the opt-in AMT management, which means that the default config is not vulnerable.
Interesting how this article steadfastly refers to the subsystem as AMT and never mentions Management Engine/ME. A deliberate ploy to redirect people away from discovering all the ME-disabling research and tech? Perhaps. This is what happens when "journalists" post copypasta from publicists.
I quote: "When AMT is enabled, all network packets are redirected to the Intel Management Engine"
Is the amount of attention this is getting commensurate with how interesting/surprising/consequential a security flaw it is?
I disagree with the article. If anything, it's much less severe than many people thought. - It's a logic bug (authentication bypass) instead of a memory corruption. An authentication bypass is bad, but a full compromise would have been much worse. - It's a bug in the opt-in AMT management, which means that the default config is not vulnerable.
Given the authentication bypass essentially leads to full compromise, where's the difference, here?
It just keeps getting better: Intel's diagnostic tool is published with an MD5 checksum.
That's fine. I will literally give you $10,000 if¹ you can give me a MD5 preimage attack. Take your attack vector to be that particular md5sum that you are making fun of. MD5 is not broken for the usage that you think it's broken for. Please don't snipe on things like this again. People like you who say things like "md5 is always bad" or "you should bcrypt, duh" are literally cargo culting the idea of computer securi…
Correct; it's broken for everything since we've got the computational power to make it essentially ineffective.
It just keeps getting better: Intel's diagnostic tool is published with an MD5 checksum.
That's fine. I will literally give you $10,000 if¹ you can give me a MD5 preimage attack. Take your attack vector to be that particular md5sum that you are making fun of. MD5 is not broken for the usage that you think it's broken for. Please don't snipe on things like this again. People like you who say things like "md5 is always bad" or "you should bcrypt, duh" are literally cargo culting the idea of computer securi…
MD5 is known to be a poor option. And every few years the practicalities of attacking it increase. And when the type of attack described here does become practical, all we'll be hearing is one side saying "they had ten years to fix this" and another side saying "but experts we consulted said it was fine".
It is incredibly easy for whatever process builds a website with an MD5 hash of a download to instead display something else, so the cost trade off becomes:
Cost: Virtually nil Mitigation: Currently minimal but has future potential
That a company would look at that and say "I guess we'll make a choice to stick with MD5" says something, even if it doesn't say the website downloads are easily compromised.
Alternatively, the parent comment could be pointing out that no hash signature that only exists on the download site itself offers value, and they would be better served offering a GPG signature or similar.
I disagree with the article. If anything, it's much less severe than many people thought. - It's a logic bug (authentication bypass) instead of a memory corruption. An authentication bypass is bad, but a full compromise would have been much worse. - It's a bug in the opt-in AMT management, which means that the default config is not vulnerable.
"An authentication bypass is bad, but a full compromise would have been much worse." Given the authentication bypass essentially leads to full compromise, where's the difference, here?
Arbitrary code execution on the ME would mean total control of the host, i.e. privileges above any software you can run on a computer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine. I will literally give you $10,000 if¹ you can give me a MD5 preimage attack. Take your attack vector to be that particular md5sum that you are making fun of. MD5 is not broken for the usage that you think it's broken for. Please don't snipe on things like this again. People like you who say things like "md5 is always bad" or "you should bcrypt, duh" are literally cargo culting the idea of computer securi…
"MD5 is not broken for the usage that you think it's broken for." Correct; it's broken for everything since we've got the computational power to make it essentially ineffective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the comment: What the programmer should have done is check if the hash coming from the browser has the correct length, 32 characters, before attempting to compare the two strings. Or even better, the programmer should have used the proper string comparing function, strcmp, that already does that for you...
strcmp has its own issues. What they actually should have done is use a cryptography library with properly implemented comparison, because it is surprisingly easy to get wrong. Also, fixed length hashes aren't strings. They shouldn't use the same functions as strings. Edit: Using a proper cryptography library also might have saved them from using MD5. At the very least, most modern libraries have a warning that is is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"MD5 is not broken for the usage that you think it's broken for." Correct; it's broken for everything since we've got the computational power to make it essentially ineffective.
That's not entirely true. It's broken in the sense that for every hash given we can compute an input that produces this hash. Constructing a useful input (in this case a working exploit) is much less trivial. The complexity depends significantly on what the desired input should look like. It's easier for input that have the property that they can ignore chunks of the input (googles PDF example), but still hard for ot…
MD5 is still preimage and second-preimage resistant.