Self-explanitory thread, for discussing hardware problems or methods of facilitating backdoors, as well as discussion of mitigation.
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See also:
INTEL-SA-00086 does not affect the Librem 14 since it uses a 10th generation CPU (Comet Lake), but it affects the entire Librem 13/15 product line.
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Most people would think of a backdoor as something that was intentionally put there. Where is the line between bug and backdoor? Is INTEL-SA-00086 a backdoor?
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At risk of distracting users from very important issues, is it possible that my post here (Are the Intel NSA backdoors fully disabled on all devices? - #23 by Dlonk) is better served by being moved to this thread?
That being said, after some reflection, I regret my conclusion that sounded as if we should all give up on computer security in that post. Ultimately, I do not believe we should give up. A better way for me to say it is that I believe I will most likely fail, but that it is nevertheless worth trying whenever we have available information that might help us to secure ourselves as best as possible.
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This should be an interesting thread.
My first question would be: when you say hardware backdoors, do you mean strictly hardware manipulations or would you also include very low level system firmware like ACM, fsp-m/fsp-s/fsp-t, microcodes, CSME runtime and modules and all the crap necessary to even have a CPU online?
If we should consider low-level firmware acting directly on basic hardware and possible backdoor there, I would say that anything being open-sourced is the mitigation (scrutiny) and anything closed-source or even totally undocumented, should be considered as potential backdoor - and unfortunately we can do nothing about this except being forced to trust third-parties we should not trust because we don’t know if they are working in our best interests or anyone else’s interests.
As for strictly hardware implants or manipulations, who knows? Creativity is endless, ranging from NSA’s Ants Catalog to smd resistors (or so you think) that tap onto the LPC bus IN/OUT lines between the TPM and the controller and are in fact a tiny SOC spying TPM secrets as they travel by…
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Probably a safe bet, I created this thread to kinda help clean up that other thread anyway. But also needed its own discussion.
Well you normally don’t take the garbage out the front door. Social faux pas with the neighbors. Secondly, the building code may require it.
(Use these as metaphors.of course.)
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Hardware, firmware, or exploitation of hardware in an out-of-band method.
INTEL-SA-00086 is a vulnerability capable of facilitating a ring -2 backdoor:
For the purposes of this discussion, a bug is an unintended behavior produced by software, firmware, or hardware, and a backdoor is an exploit based on any required number of bugs in order to bypass security measures and escalate privilege for an unauthorized attacker.
I would interpret the topic as discussion surrounding hardware vulnerabilities, so the latter is applicable. Manufacturing Mode is based on Intel hardware and its (mis)configuration determines whether or not Heads is supported:
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Yes, IME is an example, probably the most infamous example lol
Here are a few resources I have been reading recently:
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