Krzysztof Okupski, IOActive Associate Principal Security Consultant, will be presenting ‘Back to the Future with Platform Security’ at Hexacon 2023.
In the last decade the industry has seen a large amount of research released around Intel platform security. Since the release of CHIPSEC, the industry has had a tool to quickly analyze their Intel platform against a secure baseline for misconfigurations. As a result of this, it has become more difficult to find misconfigured Intel platforms from major OEMs.
As we dove into the platform security realm ourselves, we noticed a complete lack of focus and analysis of AMD platforms. This was a surprise to us due to the popularity and significantly growing market share of AMD.
The presentation will cover a deep dive into interesting architectural differences across Intel and AMD that make up for the security of the platform: a first glance of various AMD security features, such as ROM Armor and Platform Secure Boot. Additionally, several vulnerabilities will be presented, when combined, allowed us to inject a persistent firmware implant running in ring -2 on various systems.
All these details have been flushed into a tool that we developed which can be used by end users to quickly verify that their systems are free from common misconfigurations.