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A new vulnerability has been discovered in Intel's Converged Security and Manageability Engine (CSME), the embedded system that oversees management of Intel system chipsets (not processors, this time). The vulnerability is a DMA race that potentially allows hostile code to overwrite memory in the embedded management engine before the management engine enables memory protection on its own memory space. Key to the vulnerability is the fact that this memory protection is disabled by default until and unless the management engine enables it — i.e, it is unsafe by default, and fails unsafe.During that timing gap, other hardware – physically attached or present on the motherboard – that is able to fire off a DMA transfer into the CSME's private RAM may do so, overwriting variables and pointers and hijacking its execution. At that point, the CSME can be commandeered for malicious purposes, all out of view of the software running above it.
The vulnerability is exploitable whenever the chipset is starting up. The chipset is vulnerable from the time the CSME boot ROM first initializes the memory page direvctory, up until the IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management Unit) is turned on. Critically, this occurs not only at system boot time, but every time the CSME or the IOMMU resets.
What this means is that every time the CSME comes out of sleep mode, or any time the CSME is reset, it is briefly vulnerable to attack.
The CSME provides, among other things, something called Enhanced Privacy ID, or EPID. This is used for things like providing anti-piracy DRM protections, and Internet-of-Things attestation. The engine also provides TPM functions, which allow applications and operating system software to securely store and manage digital keys for things like file-system encryption. At the heart of this cryptography is a Chipset Key that is encrypted by another key baked into the silicon, and you can't do too much damage, it seems, until you can decrypt the Chipset Key.
If someone manages to extract that hardware key, though, they can unlock the Chipset Key, and, with code execution within the CSME, they can undo Intel's root of trust on large swathes of products at once, we're told."To fully compromise EPID, hackers would need to extract the hardware key used to encrypt the Chipset Key, which resides in Secure Key Storage (SKS)," explained Positive's Mark Ermolov.
"However, this key is not platform-specific. A single key is used for an entire generation of Intel chipsets. And since the ROM vulnerability allows seizing control of code execution before the hardware key generation mechanism in the SKS is locked, and the ROM vulnerability cannot be fixed, we believe that extracting this key is only a matter of time.
"When this happens, utter chaos will reign. Hardware IDs will be forged, digital content will be extracted, and data from encrypted hard disks will be decrypted."
UK police deny responsibility for poster urging parents to report kids for using Kali Linux-Arizona Hot (February 15, 2020, 09:21 AM)
Even worse is that Discord is on there. Discord is very popular amongst the gaming community for chat, voice chat, and similar gaming related activities.-Deozaan (February 15, 2020, 03:38 PM)
And I liked it well enough until a couple years later I started having issues which indicate that the microswitch is failing in the mouse button(s).
1. Sometimes a click doesn't register at all.
2. Sometimes a single click registers as a double click.
3. Sometimes a click & drag registers as a single click & release.-Deozaan (February 13, 2020, 05:57 PM)
I found Brave Rewards Settings and turned off the pop-up; but now my 'new' home page has a purple nag-tag picture that begs me to turn it back on. Why do companies of great products insist on ripping off or otherwise annoying their loyal patrons? This is getting old fast. I wonder how popular (as in 'un-') the obnoxious Sales staff is with the rest of Brave's crew.-holt (February 12, 2020, 06:09 AM)
Funny comic.
But it's gotten me curious: How come it's so trendy to hate on PHP so much? Is there a succinct explanation on what's wrong with PHP? Seems like a walk in the park next to something like the nightmare working in JavaScript has become.-Deozaan (February 09, 2020, 07:10 PM)
Probably the real questionbeingthat should be asked here is whether or not SigCheckGUI works with the 64-bit version of SigCheck.-Deozaan (February 08, 2020, 03:13 AM)
