That's not what he's saying and you know...You are saying AMD dosent has the built-in Security Processor like Intel?
You need both a vPRO supporting CPU and Q chipset to be affected.
This can also be fixed by a firmware update, but man, that has to be hard to do when you have hundreds or thousands of them.
From the lovely Joanna Rutkowska, who any self respecting geek must have a little crush on, has a few things to say on the matter ;
http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/10/27/x86_harmful.html
her paper
http://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf
summa sumarum
"Finally, the Intel Management Engine (ME) technology, which is now part of all Intel processors, stands out as very troublesome, as explained in one of the chapters above. Sadly, and most depressing, there is no option for us users to opt-out from having this on our computing devices, whether we want it or not.
The author considers this as probably the biggest mistake the PC industry has got itself into she has every witnessed.
"
And to get infront of the fan based culture blowback ;
"But is the situation much different on AMD-based x86 platforms? It doesn’t seem so! The problems related to boot security seem to be similar to those we discussed in this paper. And it seems AMD has an equivalent of Intel ME also, just disguised as Platform Security Processor"
But the whole read is excellent.
So there was some truth to this after all:
https://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTEL-SA-00075&languageid=en-fr
Ars Technica picking this up. Fix incoming in a week or so.
https://arstechnica.com/security/20...-in-intel-chips-is-worse-than-anyone-thought/
int auth = 1;
int inputHashLength = strlen(inputHash);
for (int i = 0; i < inputHash; i++)
{
if (inputHash[ i ] != internalHash[ i ])
auth = 0;
}
return auth;
Looks like a CIA hack to me.
"The Intel AMT vulnerability is the first of its kind. The exploitation allows an attacker to get full control over a business computers, even if they are turned off (but still plugged into an outlet). [....]
"By nature, the Intel AMT exploitation bypasses authentication. In other words, an attacker may now [sic] credentials and still be able to use the Intel AMT functionality," it adds. "Access to ports 16992/16993 are the only requirement to perform a successful attack."
AMD has it too I believe, but not much of it is known.
This whole revelation paints a more scary picture though. We sorta know about the Intel one, but what else is backdoored at the sillicon level that we don't even know about? Anything could be backdoored really. It does not even need to use a wired connection to talk to the mothership. Cellular is pretty much available anywhere and is a well established network.
You can do so via some kind of hardware based flashing but not really something I want to chance on a $400+ cpu.
The fact that they made that mistake is sad though, that's a ridiculous primitive error and should have been caught during normal testing.
They may well have added some 3G-related silicon; but the CPU is very much inside the "shielded to keep the FCC off our backs" compartment of basically all systems. I assume that they simply baked the necessary hooks into their CPU/chipset for the system to interact with the cell modem, even if turned "off" and brick itself if so ordered.