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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

It's much worse than that. This "Intel patches" thing is a lie - or at least it doesn't mean that your systems are patched, which is what 99.9% of people reading such headlines believe happened.

Intel only patches its own firmware, but it's normally up to manufacturers to update that firmware for devices. So most PC/laptops users really won't even see these patches.

And I agree with your main point. For one of the more recent Spectre-class flaws, Intel basically said "it's third-party developers' problem to fix."

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How is this Intel ME CPU patch deployed and where does it actually go? Is there some tiny flash in the CPU itself where the Intel ME code resides? Or does the patch get deployed as part of a UEFI firmware update, but isn't actually part of UEFI firmware, and somehow the CPU can reach out and grab its own updates from UEFI?

Usually a separate patch, an ME firmware patch. The ME is physically located in the chipset but I'm not entirely sure where the FW resides, whether the chipset or a flash on the motherboard (sharing with the system UEFI/BIOS).

The ME firmware lives on an SPI FLASH chip, on the motherboard. It can either be the same chip where the BIOS is stored or a separate one (which is often the case because two smaller chips cost less than one big one)

Actually you're right. Since most of the analysis on the ME FW was done after dumping the flash from the physically removed clip on the motherboard. That might have been more difficult with a chipset embedded one.

In all honesty "most PC/laptops users" will never need these patches because their systems don't have the ME firmware. You need specific CPU, specific chipset, specific NIC, and the ME FW. Which you're only going to find in OEM systems marked as such - vPro. It's the same as the Meltdown/Spectre patches where Intel updates the code but it's up to the manufacturer to include it where applicable.

A regular desktop motherboard might include the correct HW but the manufacturer won't bother including the ME FW.

And companies like Lenovo, HP, and Dell already offer the updated ME firmware.

> In all honesty "most PC/laptops users" will never need these patches because their systems don't have the ME firmware. You need specific CPU, specific chipset, specific NIC, and the ME FW.

Every Intel system shipped in the last few years has the correct CPU, chipset and some version of the ME firmware (it's involved in initial platform boot, including Boot Guard which validates the BIOS before the CPU even gets a chance to run it), however some of them have "diet" ME firmware with fewer modules present.

The supported NIC is the only one that common desktops and laptops may not have at all. There's a side-channel required between the NIC and ME for certain features like AMT (remote desktop/management), and some NICs don't/can't support it. However, I recall seeing something about Intel allowing non-Intel NICs to be used at some point.

> Which you're only going to find in OEM systems marked as such - vPro.

See slide 68:

> Our Achievements

> • Switched-on AMT on non-vPro systems

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Goryachy...

I just realized I was actually thinking about AMT FW not being present (the management over the network part). ME is indeed there since 2006 and can be removed with varying degrees of success.

But I was under the impression that the ME FW on non vPro systems is there just for things like BootGuard or TXT, which (presumably) wouldn't need the full ME functionality. I did not expect that some manufacturers ship the AMT-enabled FW without marketing it as such.

I can't see the actual demo so I imagine they found some non-vPro system where the manufacturer actually shipped the full AMT FW. I'm curious if that's a common occurrence.

Non-AMT firmware is about the 3-4 time smaller than AMT-enabled firmware. That's a hefty difference so if you have the non-AMT version and you can still somehow enable it you'd get a very limited subset of what AMT usually is.

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