Intel AMT on wireless networks

More details about Intel's AMT vulnerablity have been released - it's about the worst case scenario, in that it's a total authentication bypass that appears to exist independent of whether the AMT is being used in Small Business or Enterprise modes (more background in my previous post here). One thing I claimed was that even though this was pretty bad it probably wasn't super bad, since Shodan indicated that there were only a small number of thousand machines on the public internet and accessible via AMT. Most deployments were probably behind corporate firewalls, which meant that it was plausibly a vector for spreading within a company but probably wasn't a likely initial vector.

I've since done some more playing and come to the conclusion that it's rather worse than that. AMT actually supports being accessed over wireless networks. Enabling this is a separate option - if you simply provision AMT it won't be accessible over wireless by default, you need to perform additional configuration (although this is as simple as logging into the web UI and turning on the option). Once enabled, there are two cases:

1. The system is not running an operating system, or the operating system has not taken control of the wireless hardware. In this case AMT will attempt to join any network that it's been explicitly told about. Note that in default configuration, joining a wireless network from the OS is not sufficient for AMT to know about it - there needs to be explicit synchronisation of the network credentials to AMT. Intel provide a wireless manager that does this, but the stock behaviour in Windows (even after you've installed the AMT support drivers) is not to do this.
2. The system is running an operating system that has taken control of the wireless hardware. In this state, AMT is no longer able to drive the wireless hardware directly and counts on OS support to pass packets on. Under Linux, Intel's wireless drivers do not appear to implement this feature. Under Windows, they do. This does not require any application level support, and uninstalling LMS will not disable this functionality. This also appears to happen at the driver level, which means it bypasses the Windows firewall.

Case 2 is the scary one. If you have a laptop that supports AMT, and if AMT has been provisioned, and if AMT has had wireless support turned on, and if you're running Windows, then connecting your laptop to a public wireless network means that AMT is accessible to anyone else on that network[1]. If it hasn't received a firmware update, they'll be able to do so without needing any valid credentials.

If you're a corporate IT department, and if you have AMT enabled over wifi, turn it off. Now.

[1] Assuming that the network doesn't block client to client traffic, of course