[coreboot] Is this fake news or not? Bloomberg says China is using a rice-sized chip to hack amazon servers.

[Mike Banon]

> So this board may support Intel's strict security features like BootGuard and Intel ME. These security features are so strong [???] that even the top hackers in the open source community haven't fully cracked [???]
Are you sure about that? Lots of vulnerabilities have been discovered
at these "strong security features", and before Intel patches some
vulnerability it's already in full use by some blackhat communities.
Not to mention its' quite often that UEFI/BIOS updates, including
those that deliver the security updates to ME, are neglected. The
companies have so many servers, I'm confident the majority of them are
running the outdated UEFI/BIOS versions. Also, these "strong security
features" are closed source, and security through obscurity has never
been a good thing

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 7:01 PM fightfakenews via coreboot
<coreboot at coreboot.org> wrote:
>
> I came across this news today. Bloomberg says China is using a rice-sized chip to hack amazon servers. They published videos and photos here:
>
> https://twitter.com/business/status/1047788207557865473
> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
>
> They publish very limited evidence, so it leads me questioning whether the report is true. As a worker in China's hardware industry, I'm very concerned with this report. Is this true or just another fake news deliberately created to escalate the trade war between US and China?
>
> They did not mention the product name. But they published a gif image, then I did a little research to compare Supermicro's Microblade severs with the one in this gif file. It seems the product is the MBI-6128R-T2 https://www.supermicro.com/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6128R-T2.cfm
>
> This board has dual socket R3 (LGA 2011) that supports Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4†/ v3 family. So the processor is likely to be an intel one. So this board may support Intel's strict security features like BootGuard and Intel ME. These security features are so strong that even the top hackers in the open source community haven't fully cracked...
>
> The only techinical information they give is: The chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off. (It sounds like something related with the IPMI? Is this really can be done? Even this can be done, can this be used to access data?)
>
>
>
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