[svlug] Intel Active Management Technology (AMT): not necessarily your friend

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):

> After
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/03/cisco_clock_component_may_fail/
> 
> time to buy AMD, or POWER or RISC-V?

[Article at TheReg fingers the dodgy part as an Intel Atom C2000 SoC
that Cisco uses in sundry untis.]

I sat on your query for a while to try to make sure I gave a thoughtful
answer.  The question is, of course, what new pitfalls await after you
flee more-familiar ones such as (say) Intel AMT or Intel SMM.

The thing is, chips designed for the commodity marketplace are going to
tend towards featuritis, because there's a big market reward for
throwing in value-add funcionality like AMT.  Omitting them wouldn't
shave much cost, so there they are.  For example, AMD has over the same
timespan I've been writing about -- roughly this past decade -- built
into _its_ competing chips a close equvalent 'remote management' feature
called the Platform Security Processor, which an ARM core embedded in
AMD's (recent) x86_64 CPUs.

POWER and (IIRC) RISC-V don't give you anywhere near the same CPU grunt
for the dollar that you get with either Intel or AMD's x86_64 designs.  
This is why, you might recall, Apple Computer (er., Apple, Inc., now) 
abandoned the PowerPC flavour of POWER for all of its desktop and server
gear that runs MacOS X.  But if you don't mind having lower MIPS for the
buck, sure you can go with one of the surviviing RISC flavours.

An alternative, a compromise measure in a way, would be to live with the
featuritis inherent in commodity-market CPUs (i.e., x86_64) but keep a
wary eye out for feature sets you don't want or need, and favour gear
where those can be switched off.  For example, as I mentioned upthread,
experimenters have found that on some Intel chipsets, the Management
Engine (ME) can be completely killed by the administrator by overwriting
parts of the supporting firmware.  More about that here: 
http://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/neutralizing-intels-management-engine/

  Five or so years ago, Intel rolled out something horrible. Intel’s
  Management Engine (ME) is a completely separate computing environment
  running on Intel chipsets that has access to everything. The ME has
  network access, access to the host operating system, memory, and
  cryptography engine. The ME can be used remotely even if the PC is
  powered off. If that sounds scary, it gets even worse: no one knows what
  the ME is doing, and we can’t even look at the code. [link] When — not ‘if’ —
  the ME is finally cracked open, every computer running on a recent Intel
  chip will have a huge security and privacy issue. Intel’s Management
  Engine is the single most dangerous piece of computer hardware ever
  created.

  Researchers are continuing work on deciphering the inner workings of the
  ME, and we sincerely hope this Pandora’s Box remains closed. Until then,
  there’s now a new way to disable Intel’s Management Engine.[link]

Avoiding this sort of featuritis entirely is going to require using
specialty CPUs (such as the ones you cite) or hobbyist-controlled ones
such as the one Rob Landley had been working on, the j-core SoC
(http://j-core.org/).