Exploiting System Management Mode with a very long interrupt
smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Exploiting System Management Mode with a very very very very very very very long interrupt. Overview It turns out that you can break SMM — the secure, ultra privileged execution environment running invisibly in the background of every x86 CPU — with nothing more than an obscenely long-running machine instruction. SMM requires that all cores are either in SMM or out of SMM at the same time.
- ▪smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Exploiting System Management Mode with a very very very very very very very long interrupt.
- ▪Overview It turns out that you can break SMM — the secure, ultra privileged execution environment running invisibly in the background of every x86 CPU — with nothing more than an obscenely long-running machine instruction.
- ▪SMM requires that all cores are either in SMM or out of SMM at the same time.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | GitHub |
| Canonical URL | https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:03:14 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T16:30:44.389Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T16:30:44.389Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4hCspepFNLS8 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Exploiting System Management Mode with a very very very very very very very long interrupt. Overview It turns out that you can break SMM — the secure, ultra privileged execution environment running invisibly in the background of every x86 CPU — with nothing more than an obscenely long-running machine instruction. SMM requires that all cores are either in SMM or out of SMM at the same time. Its security model doesn't work without this - when one thread enters SMM, it makes all the others enter too. To break this, all we need is someone too busy to notice they're supposed to join SMM.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.