Google Even Fear Intel ME, Reduce Their Attack Vector With NERF

Even Google is concerned about attack vectors with UEFI and Intel's Management Engine that their NERF project seeks to alleviate some of these concerns and is used by their servers.

NERF is short for the Non-Extensible Reduced Firmware and is their effort to replace most of the UEFI firmware with a small Linux kernel and initramfs while their custom portions of the code are written in the Go programming language.

NERF is developed by Ron Minnich and Google's other Coreboot developers. Minnich was talking about their NERF project at this week's Embedded European Linux Conference.

NERF delivers "Linux performance and reliability in firmware" as well as eliminates all post-boot activity of UEFI and the Management Engine, rather than allowing it to run concurrently in the background.

Currently the NERF effort is focused on Intel hardware while the Coreboot developers acknowledge the latest AMD chips are closed up too and "Don’t believe all you read about Ryzen."

Those wishing to learn more can see Minnich's ELCE 2017 PDF slides while no video recording is yet available.