IPMI’s Inconvenient Truth: A Conversation With Dan Farmer

Dan Farmer warns that insecure implementations of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and baseboard management controllers (BMCs) may leave hundreds of thousands of servers vulnerable to near-undetectable remote compromise. His paper "Sold Down The River" and this interview detail protocol and configuration weaknesses across IPMI v1.5 and v2.0, the risks to large-scale rollouts and cloud infrastructure, the paucity of vendor guidance and tooling, and the potential for highly stealthy espionage or disruption if BMCs are abused.