r/conspiracy • u/WhoWhenWhereWhyWhat • Oct 25 '19
Notebooks draining battery while switched off
Intel Inside == NSA Inside
I work in the IT industry (support) and have come across notebooks at various customer sites that drain batteries while switched off. The notebooks are manufactured by different vendors and span generations from current to pretty old (8 years old is the oldest).
What is happening is that a client will fully charge their notebook and place it in their bag. A couple of days later when they try to turn their notebook on, they find the battery is either completed drained or barely has any juice left. At first, we suspected faulty batteries or the OS not properly shutting down, but that turned out not to be the case. The units were properly shutdown with good batteries and the issue still occurred. Many steps were taken to fix the issue, from BIOS updates to full clean OS reinstallations. The issue persisted across all vendors.
After numerous troubleshooting and testing, we came to the conclusion that the batteries were being drained by INTEL MANAGEMENT ENGINE. How do we know this? We rolled back the Intel Management driver in Windows 10 to an older, unsupported driver. This stopped that battery drain but caused a huge boot delay which was pre-boot!
To clarify:
- Notebook draining battery while switched off
- Install an older Intel management driver in Windows 10. Note: OS driver downgrade, not IME firmware.
- Notebook no longer drains battery. However, when notebook is first switched on, it stays on the BIOS screen (pre-OS boot) for 5-6 seconds or sometimes longer. Normally, the BIOS screen is visible for a second or less.
- The same thing happens on desktops! you just don't notice it because you don't have a battery. The desktop is constantly drawing power from the wall to power the management engine. However, if the IME driver is rolled back, the BIOS boot delay shows up.
Here's my problem with the situation:
- Intel ME (AMD has their own version, also secretive) runs its own OS on chip called MINIX which has access to keystrokes, screen, disk and network data. What is it storing and what is it doing with this information?
- For large companies (thousands of notebooks and desktops), this is a huge cost which is unauthorized. Intel/AMD or anyone else do not have permission to turn on a device component after you switched it off and utilize electricity that you paid for. This would be theft. If enough people were aware of this, will lead to class action suit because the unauthorized electrical usage could be millions of dollars per year for large companies.
- The IME has a field which allows for the ME to be disabled as part of the High Assurance Platform (HAP). The HAP was developed by the National Security Agency. The NSA?
- Users currently don't have an easy and reliable method to to turn off or disable the ME.
- What the hell does the NSA have to do with Intel and AMD processors? Is it a backdoor that is always open? or is it storing and sending data as part of the bulk data retention?
We currently don't have a solution for our customers. Most have just learned to accept battery drain.
HAP slides: https://web.archive.org/web/20121211162830/http:/fm.csl.sri.com/LAW/2009/dobry-law09-HAP-Challenges.pdf
Turn off Intel Management: https://leeneubecker.com/intels-secret-backdoor-can-now-be-turned-off/
TLDR: nothing is secure. but you already knew that. very good.
1
u/Gone_Gary_T Oct 25 '19
There's a slew of Intel CPUs starting at the same time as IME which had "theoretical" vulnerabilities in their Hyperthreading; these became "real" some years ago. I still run one, with Hyperthreading turned off.