Tag Archives: Intel

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DumpPartInfo

Hao Wu of Intel posted a patch to EDK2 which provides support for UEFI’s “EFI Partition Infomation Protocol”, and includes a DumpPartInfo tool:

Add the EFI Partition Information Protocol per the latest UEFI spec.

Test for the series:
A simple application called ‘DumpPartInfo’ is used to dump the contents of the Partition Information protocols when the following devices are attached:
a. MBR Hard disk
b. GPT Hard disk
c. CDROM

The source of the application and the series is available at:
https://github.com/hwu25/edk2 branch:partition_info_test

8 files changed, 216 insertions(+), 88 deletions(-)

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Dmytro on PCI-E/SMM vulnerability

Dmytro has an interesting 6-part twitter post on PCI-e security:

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Black Hat Briefings: Firmware is the New Black

 

Firmware is the New Black – Analyzing Past Three Years of BIOS/UEFI Security Vulnerabilities
Bruce Monroe, Rodrigo Branco, Vincent Zimmer

In recent years, we witnessed the rise of firmware-related vulnerabilities, likely a direct result of increasing adoption of exploit mitigations in major/widespread operating systems – including for mobile phones. Pairing that with the recent (and not so recent) leaks of government offensive capabilities abusing supply chains and using physical possession to persist on compromised systems, it is clear that firmware is the new black in security. This research looks into BIOS/UEFI platform firmware, trying to help making sense of the threat. We present a threat model, discuss new mitigations that could have prevented the issues and offer a categorization of bug classes that hopefully will help focusing investments in protecting systems (and finding new vulnerabilities). Our data set comprises of 90+ security vulnerabilities handled by Intel Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) in the past 3 years and the analysis was manually performed, using white-box and counting with feedback from various BIOS developers within the company (and security researchers externally that reported some of the issues – most of the issues were found by internal teams, but PSIRT is involved since they were found to also affect released products).

https://www.blackhat.com/us-17/briefings/schedule/index.html#firmware-is-the-new-black—analyzing-past-three-years-of-biosuefi-security-vulnerabilities-6924

 

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Hardware is the new software

https://twitter.com/binitamshah/status/875375226690863105

Hardware is the new software
Andrew Baumann, Microsoft Research

Moore’s Law may be slowing, but, perhaps as a result, other measures of processor complexity are only accelerating. In recent years, Intel’s architects have turned to an alphabet soup of instruction set extensions such as MPX, SGX, MPK, and CET as a way to sell CPUs through new security features. Unlike prior extensions, which mostly focused on accelerating user-mode data processing, these new features exhibit complex interactions and give system designers plenty to think about. This calls for a rethink of how we approach the instruction set. In this paper we highlight some of the challenges arising from recent security-focused extensions, and speculate about the longer-term implications.

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/baumann-hotos17.pdf

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Intel AMT Clickjacking Vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00081)

Today Intel announced a NEW AMT security advisory:

Intel® AMT Clickjacking Vulnerability
Intel ID: INTEL-SA-00081
Product family: Intel® Active Management Technology
Impact of vulnerability: Information Disclosure
Severity rating: Moderate
Original release: Jun 05, 2017

Insufficient clickjacking protection in the Web User Interface of Intel® AMT firmware versions before 9.1.40.100, 9.5.60.1952, 10.0.0.50.1004 and 11.0.0.1205 potentially allowing a remote attacker to hijack users’s web clicks via attacker’s crafted web page. Affected products: Intel AMT firmware versions before 9.1.40.100, 9.5.60.1952, 10.0.0.50.1004 and 11.0.0.1205. Intel highly recommends that users update to the latest version of firmware available from their equipment manufacturer. Intel would like to thank Lenovo for reporting this issue and working with us on coordinated disclosure.[…]

https://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTEL-SA-00081&languageid=en-fr

 

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More on malware use of Intel AMT

After the recent Microsoft mention of AMT being used by malware, there is a bit more on the press on AMT:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malware-uses-obscure-intel-cpu-feature-to-steal-data-and-avoid-firewalls/

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Intel: IoT Security in the Developer’s Mind

Ricardo Echevarria of Intel has a new blog post about IoT security:

Internet-enabled smart devices open up a new universe of possibilities for how consumers interact with the world. But those same smart lightbulbs or TVs may pose a serious threat if their designers fail to strengthen the devices’ security protocols. Last year’s Mirai distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) botnet attack was a wake-up call for the computing world. By targeting vulnerable Internet-connected cameras and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the massive botnet was able to redirect enough Internet traffic to a DNS provider to crash multiple high-profile websites. It is no surprise then that IoT developers worry more about security than anything else – including interoperability, connectivity, and hardware integration. The Eclipse IoT Working Group’s 2017 IoT Developer Survey shows that security has remained the number one concern among developers for the third straight year.[…]

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2017/06/07/iot-security-in-the-developers-mind

 

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