Last week, there were reports in the news about chips being installed on SuperMicro motherboards at manufacturing time that provide a back door for malicious code to be run on the system. Since SuperMicro motherboards are fairly popular for servers and with various PC makers, the impact of this could be fairly big, and it raised questions about how these chips got installed and if there may be a conspiracy. This week, there have been reports that various tech companies deny that these spy chips have been found and were even installed on the SuperMicro motherboards: http://digg.com/2018/bloomberg-big-hack-supermicro-apple-amazon

Nightfox

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Re: SuperMicro motherboard spy chips
By: Nightfox to All on Wed Oct 10 2018 13:26:20

Last week, there were reports in the news about chips being installed on SuperMicro motherboards at manufacturing time that provide a back door for malicious code to be run on the system. Since SuperMicro motherboards are fairly popular for servers and with various PC makers, the impact of this could be fairly big, and it raised questions about how these chips got installed and if there may be a conspiracy. This week, there have been reports that various tech companies deny that these spy chips have been found and were even installed on the SuperMicro motherboards:

I read about that. I think that there was one single server that was infected, on the software side, but it was, ehrm, embellished a bit in the story that followed. I don't know how true any of it is, but I feel life if anything, it'd be a software exploit that'd somehow access the chip, rather than the chip itself having been created with malicious purpose.

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Re: SuperMicro motherboard spy chips
By: Derision to Nightfox on Wed Oct 10 2018 02:54 pm

Last week, there were reports in the news about chips being installed
on SuperMicro motherboards at manufacturing time that provide a back
door for malicious code to be run on the system. Since SuperMicro

I read about that. I think that there was one single server that was infected, on the software side, but it was, ehrm, embellished a bit in the story that followed. I don't know how true any of it is, but I feel life if anything, it'd be a software exploit that'd somehow access the chip, rather than the chip itself having been created with malicious purpose.

I read that the chip wasn't part of the motherboards' design documents, and there was someone who was knowledgeable in testing to see what hardware chips can do, and I think the implication was that it was determined that these hardware chips were malicious. Software could potentially be needed to exploit the chip, but that's not always true. Intel platforms, for instance, have a feature on the motherboard called the Intel Management Engine, which is an embedded Java VM designed to run Java applets at the hardware level. The purpose of the Management Engine is to implement security features that protect data outside the OS (so that software exploits won't see what's going on). Software in the OS is required to install an applet in the Management Engine, but otherwise, my understanding is that the applets in the Management Engine can potentially run without being managed by software running in the OS.

Some people have suspected the Management Engine is a backdoor device, and
I remember reading about a security breach involving the Management Engine.. So it wouldn't surprise me that there are similar chips people have developed that could do things outside the control of software on the OS. This supposed chip installed on the SuperMicro motherboards could potentially send data out through the ethernet port(s) on the motherboard.

Nightfox

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Yeah, build everything in china and wait to see what will happen.

Not surprised.

Last week, there were reports in the news about chips being installed on SuperMicro motherboards at manufacturing time that provide a back door for malicious code to be run on the system. Since SuperMicro motherboards are fairly popular for servers and with various PC makers, the impact of this could be fairly big, and it raised questions about how these chips got installed and if there may be a conspiracy. This week, there have been reports that various tech companies deny that these spy chips have been found and were even installed on the SuperMicro motherboards: http://digg.com/2018/bloomberg-big-hack-supermicro-apple-amazon

Nightfox

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