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Re:OnMetal Performance In Early Benchmarks by contingencies on Friday July 25, 2014 @03:14AM (#8084081)
It's even worse with IPMI.

AFAIK you can own either the IPMI BMC or the BIOS, then if one is flashed, the other can replace it to stay resident in denial of your attempts to remove it.

You have to coordinate flashing both at 'the same time' (which is possibly impossible) in order to get any peace of mind.

That includes situations in which the IPMI BMC isn't even plugged in to a network, because it still has constantly running firmware and backdoor access to the main system.

Of course, you can do half-way mitigations like dumping firmware contents and comparing checksums over time, but no single savior probably exists. A potentially strong tool here is a hardware jumper on the mainboards that says "disallow flashing at all, full stop" and another one that says "disallow reconfiguration at all, full stop" that is honored at a level of circuitry unenslaved to software. Both the BIOS and the IPMI BMC need protections on this level.

Re:OnMetal Performance In Early Benchmarks by cmsj on Thursday August 07, 2014 @03:04PM (#8149499)
Everything is worse with IPMI :)

(as for half-way mitigations like dumping firmware, I would suggest that that is a fairly worthless option, malicious firmware would likely be able to return clean data to the dumper, unless it was a hardware dumper)