20GB Of Intel Documents … Ever Wonder What They Share Under NDA?

Not As Juicy As You Are Probably Hoping

The contents of the leak of Intel “exconfidential Lake” documents by Tillie Kottmann, who has a history of digging up similarly insecurely stored documents from a variety of companies including the likes of Adobe, Microsoft and Qualcomm is interesting but don’t expect to find any huge secrets.  The dead give away as to the nature of the data comes from how the data was stored and the passwords used to protect the zip files; ‘Intel123’ and ‘I accept’ are commonly used to share data with a large number of press, OEMs and other vendors as making the passwords any more complex causes far more problems than it is worth.

The list of topics released bear this out, as mostly seem to be SDKs, debug builds, BIOS reference builds and roadmaps, though not everything has been released yet.  The roadmaps will interest many as they will offer insight you may not have previously had as to how they evolve before becoming publicly available, as will the PR assets.  One interesting tidbit will be the driver binaries for the cameras Intel made for SpaceX, many PC enthusiasts are also interested in space flight and learning how we get those lovely launch videos will be rather nifty.

The “(very horrible) Kaby Lake FDK training videos” should also be a good watch, if not particularly useful in making your machine more effective, however the debugging and dev tools may revitalize those that used to make custom BIOSes on a regular basis.  One last note, as the intertubes are already full of people screaming about finding references to backdoors in the code and coming up with all sorts of theories as to Intel’s nefarious activities.  Frontdoor and backdoor access refer to how register operations are turned into bus transactions,  this may not be the best reference but gives you an idea of what they are if you are unfamiliar with them.

Have fun taking a look through the various documents Intel’s partners and the press frequently receive access to and keep an eye out for more if you enjoyed it.