Hacker Finds Hidden “God Mode” on Old x86 CPUs

Megalith

Megalith

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At this week’s Black Hat conference, security researcher Christopher Domas demonstrated a so-called “God Mode” affecting certain x86 CPUs – namely, VIA’s C3 Nehemiah chips, an off-brand “military-grade” processor made in 2003. To achieve root access and the innermost ring, all the user needs to do is enter the command “.byte 0x0f, 0x3f” in Linux. Domas believes the same backdoors exist on other chipsets.

The backdoor completely breaks the protection-ring model of operating-system security, in which the OS kernel runs in ring 0, device drivers run in rings 1 and 2, and user applications and interfaces ("userland") run in ring 3, furthest from the kernel and with the least privileges. To put it simply, Domas' God Mode takes you from the outermost to the innermost ring in four bytes. "We have direct ring 3 to ring 0 hardware privilege escalation," Domas said. "This has never been done."
 
If this shit, and other similar sounding shit are not backdoors, just what is it then?
 
Let me rephrase.

The article literally says, as per the researcher, that this is more extreme in the sense that it has even more control.
 
It's like a zero-thought/concern precursor to PSP/IME. Either way, they're all stupid and exploitable proprietary hacks to implement features which can otherwise be done with any GNU kernel.
 
Nothing is truly secure in the hands of the wrong person or people unfortunately.
 
This is what happens when you let governments dictate how your product should fit in with their spying concerns...
 
You would be a fool to think these don't exist on every major manufacturer's devices/appliances. The ones that don't have these backdoors are devices owned by the 3 letter agencies and their corporate backers that have had their firmware and their OS's patched to remove the vulnerabilities. Like I have told you on this forum many times before. The backdoors are installed on purpose because corporate connected government agencies use the backdoors in order to steal corporate secrets from their competition.
 
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