Quote:Till Kottmann, a Swiss IT consultant, posted on Twitter a link to a file sharing service today that contains what an anonymous source claims is a portion of Intel's crown jewels: A 20GB folder of confidential Intel intellectual property. The leaker dubbed the release the "Intel exconfidential Lake Platform Release ."

Update: Intel has responded to Tom's Hardware with an official statement:

"We are investigating this situation. The information appears to come from the Intel Resource and Design Center, which hosts information for use by our customers, partners and other external parties who have registered for access. We believe an individual with access downloaded and shared this data."

Quote:Now, don’t mistake me — it could be that there’s some killer data lurking in this repository, with major implications for Intel security, or IP, or what have you. I haven’t exactly scanned it. But while a Simics simulation for an unreleased platform is interesting, Simics is a commercial platform you can buy. It’s a full-system simulator used for software development. There could be security flaws lurking in some of the software, and the leaker has encouraged people to look for backdoor mentions in the dump — which is a whole lot different than a leak in which you say “Hey everybody, here’s the 8MB of documents showing where Intel hid the x86 hardware backdoor… no, not IME. The other backdoor.”

Note: The degree to which closed-source processors that run invisible code (from the OS’ perspective) should be considered “backdoors” is hotly contested between a subset of security researchers and open-source computing advocates on the one hand, and Intel and AMD on the other. The former group believes that security processors and “trusted computing” zones should either not exist or, if they do exist, should be based on open, transparent projects. AMD and Intel disagree. The remark above should be considered tongue-in-cheek, particularly if you’re the kind of person who requires a paragraph-long explanation to be mollified by anything.

In any event, it’s not clear how much of this is juicy details and how much of it is dull. Some of it covers chips that were under NDA as recently as May, but the presentations we get on a regular basis are under NDA as well, and trust me, Intel doesn’t give us the keys to the kingdom, so much as information it doesn’t want leaked until it’s ready to announce it. According to Ars Technica, the details were fond on an unsecured server hosted by Akamai.