NSA contributes code to the Coreboot project, an open source alternative to Windows BIOS/UEFI firmware

NSA assigned developers to the free firmware project Coreboot, and NSA’s developer, Eugene Myers began contributing SMI Transfer Monitor (STM) x86 processor implementation code to Coreboot. Myers is part of NSA’s Trusted Systems Research Group whose mission is to conduct and fund research to protect US information security technologies.

Image: Intel

NSA’s best-known open source project is the Linux security module Security-Enhanced Linux, a security module for Linux, which recently released the reverse engineering tool Ghidra, but its work on the NIST standardization process has been controversial and has been criticized for promoting NIST’s use of backdoor encryption algorithms.

Myers published a paper last year that describes how the STM implementation works. All code is open source, and in theory, anyone can check if it has a back door.

Via: tomshardware