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Comment by W4ldi | Hacker News Reader

For that you'd need to hack Intels infrastructure and get access to the private keys.

I'm creating a startup to do just that. There's both huge upside[$$$], but also some legal risk. If this appeals to you and you're an innovator in the social engineering space lmk.

How exactly do you intend to accomplish this? Sneak into a data center and hack their build servers?

She doesn’t.

This is Hacker News, I'll remind you! Everyone is 100% serious 100% of the time.

Probably the keys are on well-guarded offline HSMs.

Are there rules/standards for how these top secret keys are stored? HDCP, Mediavine, keys to the Internet, etc. Sure, you could keep it locked in a Scrooge McDuck security vault, but you need to be able to burn the key into hardware/software, meaning it ultimately needs to be distributed across many machines, greatly increasing the number of people with potential access.

The public key needs to be in the CPU. The private key is only needed when Intel needs to sign new microcode.

Isn't this an encryption key not a signing key? There are of course signing keys involved too though.

There's both. The encryption (decryption) key has leaked. The original question was about "making your own microcode", for which you would need the (not leaked, and unlikely to leak) private signing key.

The security of these keys depend on the signing ceremony / ritual involved. Here's an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yIfMUjv-UU

That video deserves its own HN post

I agree, although it's been posted a few times already. In searching, I found a nice, and obligatory CloudFlare article on it: https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/

Or on an S3 vault somewhere.

Terrifying.

> Probably the keys are on well-guarded offline HSMs

I wouldn't be so sure...

After hearing that American nuclear launch codes were all zeroes for decades, nothing surprises me.

Those codes were intentionally zeroed to get around what was (most likely rightly so) considered to be a failure of the launch doctrine to take into account the possibility of the leadership being knocked out which would make a retaliatory launch impossible due to the lack of valid launch codes.

I don't think Intel has such problems and I assume they are keen on keeping their microcode update process from being abused - it is not as if they don't have enough problems as it is.

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