The NSA Is Looking To Contribute To A New x86 Security Feature To Coreboot

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has developers contributing to the Coreboot project.

Eugene Myers of the NSA under the Information Assurance Research, NSA/CSS Research Directorate, has been leading some work on an STM/PE implementation for Coreboot.

This implementation is for an SMI Transfer Monitor (STM) to offer protected execution services on x86 by serving as a hypervisor in x86 SMM mode. The NSA work extends STM to support additional virtual machines and paired with an integrity measurement engine can offer greater security to the system. Here's a video with more information on this STM/PE effort from last year's Platform Security Summit:

As of earlier this month, that Coreboot STM/PE code is under review including the x86 STM support and other bits.