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MCHammer
Announcement ID:
2025-08-06-001
Issue:
In a recent conference presentation titled “Ghosts in the Machine Check - Conjuring Hardware Failures to Breach CPU Privilege Boundaries”, independent researcher Christopher Domas (former Intel employee) described a method of gaining a foothold in privileged System Management Mode (SMM) using a software-only attack to abuse a vulnerability in hardware failure event handling. The researcher has named this issue “MCHammer”.
Highlighting Intel’s silicon industry leading product security assurance, no Intel platforms are affected by this issue regardless of the platform’s UEFI Development Kit v2 (EDK2) version. In as early as 2009, Intel implemented a defense-in-depth method that provides protection through microcode. Thus, Intel platforms do not rely on EDK2 to protect against this type of attack.
EDK2 serves as a reference implementation, demonstrating how the UEFI specification can be translated into code. Intel may contribute to this reference code when integrating new features into Intel products. These contributions are specific to Intel products, and it is the responsibility of other adopters to ensure the code functions correctly in their implementations. The EDK2 code referenced in the researchers presentation does not represent a vulnerability or bug on Intel platforms.
Reference:
For more information about EDK2: https://www.tianocore.org/
Acknowledgements:
Intel would like to thank Christopher Domas for reporting this issue.
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