#heci

Higher Education Commission: How HECI should differ from UGC

The Knowledge Commission advocated both privatisation and globalisation of a larger education base. (File photo)

Two models were advocated for education and skill reform. Both began with recognition of low enrolments, reversing post-Independence trends. The Knowledge Commission advocated both privatisation and globalisation of a larger education base.

The immediate past is not encouraging.…

Scrapping UGC: HRD extends deadline for receiving feedback till July 20 | education

[ad_1]

The HRD Ministry on Thursday extended the deadline for receiving feedback and suggestions from stakeholders on scrapping of the UGC and draft bill for replacing it with the Higher Education Commission for India.

The decision to extend the deadline was taken following representations from various quarters.

Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar announced at a press conference on Thursday that…

Higher Education Commission of India

In news: A Higher Education Commission of India (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) Bill 2018 which seeks to repeal UGC Act and provides for setting up of Higher Education Commission of India has been prepared by the Ministry of HRD.

  Roles and functions of Higher Education Commission of India:

The focus of the Commission will be on improving academic standards and quality of higher…

Matthew Garret (mjg59) has an essential-reading write-up about a potential security problem if you are running on Intel vPRO chipsets with a particular remote management feature enabled.

A seconded, embedded LoM (lights out management) core on many Intel chipsets seems to have a poorly secured web-interface exposed. It seizes control of network interfaces to redirect traffic to a set of ports to itself and then lets the rest through to the "normal" CPU. As this LoM-like core is capable of controlling the entire machine it means that any vulnerabilities in the web-interface in the core are punching a massive hole through all our defences.

Intel have a Let Us Talk About HECI and LMS document which explains:

Host Embedded Controller Interface (HECI ) driver is a software interface that is used to communicate to the AMT subsystem (Management Engine) to access AMT capabilities. Communication between the local host operating system (OS) and the ME is accomplished by means of the HECI driver. HECI is bi-directional, as either the host OS or Intel AMT firmware can initiate transactions. Local Manageability Service (LMS) is a service that runs locally (in the user space) in the host operating system.LMS exposes AMT functionality through standard interfaces (For Example: general-info interface, firmware update interface, local agent-presence interface, etc.). LMS listens for the request directed to the AMT local host and when a application sends SOAP/HTTP message addressed to the local host then LMS intercepts the request and routes the request to the Management Engine Interface via the HECI driver.

Scanning is best done from another machine (if you scan on the same machine and the AMT is active then it will simply intercept the probes to the ports and you will be none the wiser) on your network with nmap and by running lspci and grepping for HECI and MEI.

See especially the comments here. Note that Matthew Garrett's later work suggests that things may be even worse w.r.t. wifi on Windows platforms.

Intel released some Windows-only detection tools and information here.