Intel Firmware Tooling
Having looked deeper into what the Intel Management firmware is about, I started to prototype tooling around it for further analysis. When OSFF announced funding for projects, I took another look at the status quo, realizing that while Intel platforms had progressed over the years, open source tooling had somewhat stalled. For example, me_cleaner had its latest commit in 2018 (7 years ago), and ifdtool in coreboot was only seeing little maintenance. Only MEAnalyzer is still being actively developed. At the same time, those are all related tools, and each of them has some drawbacks of not viewing a full picture. On the other hand, Intel themselves only offer closed source tooling to their customers. So I proposed creating a new tool, promising a cleaner structure, more documentation, and for a start, feature parity with me_cleaner, in a more portable manner, including a library, possibly usable in firmware. Both me_cleaner and MEAnalyzer are written in Python, so they cannot be run in firmware as they are, and both are somewhat hard to understand.
With this talk, I present the new tool that is written in Rust, how it is designed and how it benefits from the existing software ecosystem.
