cpeil

Out-of-band management systems are standard equipment in modern data centers. They allow administrators to manage servers even when the actual operating system has long since stopped responding – from a reboot through firmware updates all the way to a complete re-installation. Every manufacturer relies on their own ecosystem here: HP on „HP Integrated Lights-Out“ (HP iLO), Dell on „integrated Dell Remote Access Controller“ (iDRAC), and Cisco on the “Cisco Integrated Management Controller” (Cisco IMC). The latter is used on the widely deployed Cisco UCS C-Series rack servers and S-Series storage servers.

These systems are especially attractive from an attacker’s perspective: whoever controls the management controller effectively sits „below” the operating system. The IMC can update the BIOS, configure SecureBoot, and thereby interact directly with the operating […]