On Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 06:05:48PM -0500, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> * On 2023 22 Mar 14:06 -0500, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote:
>> Well, I was trying to see if one could get reasonable hardware that
>> doesn't have untrustable stuff like Intel ME and AMD PSP, (...)
> I understand. I know there was a lot of speculation about it a
> couple years back or so but has it been conclusively determined that
> it acts in any nefarious manner?
While the question of:
* Whether it acts nefariously on purpose by decision of Intel
(whether that is credible to me depends on what one means by
"nefariously"; the Sony rootkit was "nefarious" in my opinion)
* Whether your particular piece of hardware that you got was
"intercepted" and changed to spy on you (like was routinely done
e.g. on Cisco and telco hardware leaving the USA...)
* Whether it still contains security bugs allowing an undetectable
firmware rootkit to be installed without Intel's collaboration, and
without access to Intel's signing keys
is at this point speculative, the fact that it allowed, for a long
time, installation of undetectable firmware rootkit is not.
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Goryachy-How-To-Hack-A-Turned-Off-Computer-Or-Running-Unsigned-Code-In-Intel-Management-Engine.pdf
I'd prefer a platform where the firmware is auditable (notwithstanding
the better wish for free software that I can modify), thank you very
much. This is becoming steadily more important; Russia and China don't
(our should not...) trust technology coming from the USA (for good
reasons), maybe from "the Western World" in general. In turn, China,
with its ever deeper "integration" between state intelligence and
technology companies... would/should "we the Western World" trust it?
If USA & Germany could, for decades, subvert the security of Crypto
AG, do we really want to "trust" that Intel, AMD, ... Oppo/OnePlus,
Huawei, Xiamo and ... Lenovo ... and ... IBM ... are not subverted?
If ASML collaborates with the USA to "block" Chinese capacity in chip
production, can we trust that NXP does not collaborate with USA
intelligence, in a world where we have known for decades that they
perform worldwide mass surveillance, injection of backdoors in
cryptography standards, etc?
Look at the situation and recent events around UEFI secure
boot... Microsoft is the sole gatekeeper to who/what can boot on an
amd64 PC out of the box (they are the _only_ ones whose bootloader
signing keys are in the firmware "out of the box"). It starts
innocuous enough, they setup a service where they (I assume for a
fee...) audit your bootloader and sign it. The whole GNU/Linux / free
OS ecosystem has done efforts to make their work in doing that, and
managing revocation / blocklisting of known vulnerable bootloader
versions, easier. They, by fiat, suddenly they decide that ... no, on
a certified machine, any non-Microsoft bootloader signed by Microsoft
_is_ _not_ allowed out of the box.
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html
So, no, having Intel, AMD, etc being the stewards... may have worked
OK for some time, but I don't want to lock us collectively into that,
if we can avoid it.
Lionel
