Description

On May 5, 2023, Binarly's CEO issued a warning concerning leaked source code containing image signing private keys for 57 MSI products and Intel Boot Guard private keys for 116 MSI devices; the Intel Boot Guard OEM keys are generated by the system's manufacturer, not Intel. This occurred after the Money Message extortion organization began publishing stolen data from the March 2023 MSI hack attack. Intel is investigating a breach of the private keys used by the Intel Boot Guard security feature, which could impair its capacity to detect malicious UEFI software on MSI systems. In March 2023, the MSI breach attack claimed 1.5 TB of data, including source code, firmware, and databases, and demanded $4 million in ransom. After MSI failed to pay, attackers began leaking the company's data on their data breach site, including source code for the company's motherboard firmware. This breach may have rendered Intel BootGuard inoperable and ineffective for MSI devices running on 11th Tiger Lake, 12th Adler Lake, and 13th Raptor Lake CPUs. The leak has compromised Intel's whole ecosystem, posing a direct threat to MSI customers and rendering the security feature ineffective. Using the firmware signing keys, the hacker can develop malicious firmware updates and transmit them via a conventional BIOS update procedure using MSI update tools. Further, the leaked MSI source code contains the secret keys for the Manifest (KM) and Boot Policy Manifest (BPM), which are used for Boot Guard technology, which permits firmware verification using a hardware Root of Trust.