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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-should-all-be-using-riscv dept.

Intel Warns of Critical Info-Disclosure Bug in Security Engine

A critical security bug in the Intel Converged Security and Manageability Engine (CSME) could allow escalation of privilege, denial of service or information disclosure.

The details are included in a bug advisory that in total covers 77 vulnerabilities, 67 of which were found by internal Intel staff. The silicon giant has rolled out firmware updates and software patches to address these, which range in severity from the one critical flaw to a low-severity local privilege-escalation issue.

The affected products are: Intel CSME, Intel Server Platform Services (SPS), Intel Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), Intel Platform Trust Technology (PTT) and Intel Dynamic Application Loader (DAL).

[...]The critical flaw is a heap overflow bug with a score of 9.6 out of 10 on the CVSS v.3 severity scale (CVE-2019-0169). It exists in the subsystem in the Intel CSME, which is a standalone chip on Intel CPUs that is used for remote management. The vulnerability and[sic] could allow an unauthenticated user to enable escalation of privileges, information disclosure or denial of service via adjacent access.

“Adjacent access” means that an attack must be launched from the same shared physical network or local IP subnet, or from within the same secure VPN or administrative network zone.

Read the rest of the article for details on the additional vulnerabilities that were addressed.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:38AM (18 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:38AM (#919648)

    Is it ever a bad thing to find more vulns in the Management Engine? Eventually, we will be able to turn it off.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:45AM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:45AM (#919653)

    Right now you can assume both Israel and America have access to Intel's signing keys. So unless there are regionally signed versions of the processor for other markets (AMD's Ryzen 1 EPYC licensees for instance) every other country running confidential data or code on an Intel processor must be considered compromised and airgapped, firewalled, etc as appropriate with a piece of hardware that is known secure...

    Except what hardware is? We have such a technological oligarchiculture going on right now that all hardware can or has a history of being exploited or backdoored by someone, usually the domestic producer or the foreign designer.

    In order for us to once again trust our technology it needs to go back to individual heterogenous modules all interoperating to public international standards in a manner which can be mix and matched to a level where no individual component can compromise the whole, outside of maybe passively sniffing signals from other chips and in limited circumstances being able to funnel that information to a third party (dangerous but complicated to pull off on a large scale in a heterogenous technology marketplace.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:06AM (13 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:06AM (#919665)

      Or you can just run Apple, which is secure by design.

      • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:12AM (8 children)

        by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:12AM (#919667) Journal

        Unfortunately for Apple, the weakest part of the Apple design is the Intel CPU.

        --
        Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:13AM (6 children)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:13AM (#919668) Journal

          They will move to Apple ARM chips [tomshardware.com]. Checkmate!

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:57AM

            by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:57AM (#919685) Journal

            I can't stop to note the verb tense in the proposition just before the "Checkmate!"

            Besides, in the linked, there are some other bits

            This week's report from Bloomberg reiterated Macs running on Arm may arrive in 2020. Axios' report seemingly confirmed the claim, citing "developers and Intel officials."

            Which is like "Someone says the Jesus'es second coming may happen as soon as 2020"

            --
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
          • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:58AM (4 children)

            by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:58AM (#919686) Journal

            Yes. Intel not to be trusted is the main reason. Also, Apple engineering zealots worship energy consumption reduction at all costs, which does not help users much and Intel's future either. There is only one thing which could motivate me to come back to Apple products again: an AMD based MacBook Pro at 19' size. Not an Intel, and definitely not a toy size mechanically fragile flat pack.

            --
            Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
            • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:32PM (3 children)

              by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:32PM (#919801) Journal

              19"

              ftfy

              And you thought no one was reading this deep in the thread.

              19' macbooks coming for xmas 2020!!!!!! You think you have seen a big screen, but wait til you see this!

              • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:07AM (2 children)

                by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:07AM (#920107) Homepage Journal

                For those who use metric, 19" is nineteen inches, about 50 cm.
                19' is nineteen feet, about 580 cm.

                -- hendrik

                • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday November 14 2019, @12:30PM (1 child)

                  by driverless (4770) on Thursday November 14 2019, @12:30PM (#920302)

                  What's that in furlongs? We haven't switched to these newfangled inchy things yet where I live.

                  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @11:11AM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @11:11AM (#920654)

                    It's 28.79 millifurlongs [wolframalpha.com]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:31AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:31AM (#919763)

          What about that "made in China bit? Intel introduces one or more weaknesses into Apple products, and the (slave?) labor in China introduces more.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:28AM (3 children)

        by SomeGuy (5632) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:28AM (#919675)

        One of those Talos II PPC based systems is looking really nice right now.

        • (Score: 2) by Acabatag on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:15AM (2 children)

          by Acabatag (2885) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:15AM (#919691)

          I went to the Raptor Computing web page to see what the Talos II was about. There was a nice hardware page. I clicked to switch over to the software page.

          It was completely blank. So I switched over to a browser without NoScript and an Adblocker to see what was not showing on the 'Software' page because my browser was blocking it. Still a blank page.

          So do you have to run NetBSD on this thing? I like NetBSD a lot, but it limits me for the most part to pkgsrc. Lots of good software there, but lots of things are missing.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:37PM

      by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:37PM (#919802) Journal

      well said.

      Someone also has to make sure they aren't putting wifi transmitters onto chips, or rfid'able tags to passively track people by their cpus and other fun things.

      I would like to catch the intel cpu phoning home over ethernet, they can be invisible on the chip but they cannot be invisible over transmission.

      Sadly, yet another reason to resist 5g, in those high frequencies and newly opening bands, who knows what nano transmitters will be reporting from your local keylogger.

  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:31AM (1 child)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:31AM (#919764) Journal

    Haven't tried it myself since I'm not using the relevant CPU, but I saw this article which describes strategies for disabling the ME (although it continues to be active when the system is first powered on)
    http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html [ptsecurity.com]

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:13AM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:13AM (#920111) Homepage Journal

      Purism disables the management engine in their intel computers. There's some code you set in the Management Engine's internal virtual disk so that after booting the main processor the ME shuts down, a feature allegedly implemented by intel at the request of the NSA.
      I wonder if this is enough to disable this attack.