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Days after being announced, Tenable reverse engineered the Intel AMT Vulnerability. According to a blog post, the vulnerability is a backdoor dream. The AMT web interface uses HTTP Digest Authentication, which uses MD5. The problem is that partial matches of the hash are also accepted. Therefore, Tenable decided to experiment and while doing so:
[W]e reduced the response hash to one hex digit and authentication still worked. Continuing to dig, we used a NULL/empty response hash (response="" in the HTTP Authorization header).
Authentication still worked. We had discovered a complete bypass of the authentication scheme.
Long story short, for over five years, a complete and trivial bypass of AMT authentication has existed. If this wasn't an intentional backdoor, it is a monumental mistake in security and coding best practices. Regardless, the "backdoor" is now public. With Shodan showing thousands of unpatchable computers (as no patch is currently available, assuming they would ever be patched) exposed to the Internet, some poor IT sod is bound to show up to work some bad news on Monday.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 07 2017, @11:56AM
Possibly, but maybe not. I like my AMD's, but early Sledgehammer chips had problems that required a microcode patch. Watching the bootup screen, that microcode patch was one of the first things to run during boot. Some info on one microcode update here: http://www.securiteam.com/securityreviews/5FP0M1PDFO.html [securiteam.com]
I guess you can patch a lot, but there is no indication in the article whether it can be patched. Some things are, as you say, "baked in".