AMD x86 SMU firmware analysis: Do you care about Matroshka processors?

Presented at 31C3 (2014), Dec. 27, 2014, 9:45 p.m. (60 minutes).

You definitely should care. The aim of this talk is to provide insight to the security, architecture and yes you guessed it, vulnerability of the AMD System Management Unit (SMU) firmware found in modern AMD x86 processors.

Every modern x86 platform contains several other auxiliary processors, which kind of erase the line between pure hardware and software. How well are those processors secured? What is running on them? Is there a way to analyze them?

Great attention had the Intel ME engine, but similar, although not so unfriendly processor(s) exists on the AMD platforms too. The aim of this talk is to provide insight to the security, architecture and vulnerability of the AMD SMU firmware found in modern AMD x86 processors.

The SMU is designed to prevent unauthorized code execution, thus making it ideal candidate to verify if it is so. This is where the fun starts.

The overall goal is to educate the audience enough that they may (and want to) start to tinker around various non-x86 firmwares found on x86 systems on their own.

Presenters:

• Rudolf Marek
  I always liked to tinker the bare bones of the hardware and software. I contributed to several free software projects such as lm-sensors, coreboot or Linux device drivers (mostly hwmon and i2c stuff). I'm known under nickname Ruik. In my professional life I work SYSGO, a company developing a virtualization RTOS for safety critical applications.

Links:

• https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/events/6103.html

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