Over the past few years, Intel has invested a lot of effort in developing security technologies for the firmware used in modern computer platforms. Cylance specialist Alex Matrosov identified a number of vulnerabilities related to the implementation of UEFI BIOS protection measures by major motherboard vendors, by exploiting which an attacker could compromise the system and gain full control over it.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the interface between the operating system and the hardware. Intel has developed numerous technologies to protect the firmware from attacks, including Intel Boot Guard and BIOS Guard.

The sailors identified at least 6 vulnerabilities in the implementation of firmware security functions by various vendors.

In particular, in the compact PC ASUS Vivo Mini, Lenovo ThinkCentre and MSI Cubi2, privilege privilege vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-11315, CVE-2017-3753 and CVE-2017-11312 / CVE-2017-11316, respectively) were detected, the expert also found a number Problems (CVE-2017-11313, CVE-2017-11314) in the mini-PC Gigabyte BRIX, the joint operation of which allows to bypass the BIOS Guard protection.

The researcher informed manufacturers about the vulnerabilities found.