US chipmaker Intel Corp has confirmed the leak of proprietary source code for its Alder Lake BIOS/UEFI firmware, after a third party published a data dump (now removed) claimed to be the source code related to Alder Lake on 4chan and GitHub.
Alder Lake is Intel's codename for the 12th generation of Intel Core processors released in November 2021.
“Our proprietary UEFI code appears to have been leaked by a third party. We do not believe this exposes any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure. This code is covered under our bug bounty program within the Project Circuit Breaker campaign, and we encourage any researchers who may identify potential vulnerabilities to bring them our attention through this program. We are reaching out to both customers and the security research community to keep them informed of this situation,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement to Tom’s Hardware.
In addition to the UEFI code, the leak contained private keys, change logs, and compilation tools, some of which appear to come from Taiwan-based software designer Insyde Software.
At the time of writing, it’s unclear whether the leak was the result of a cyberattack, or the work of an insider.