Modern motherboards are fairly daunting pieces of hardware. They’re full of closed-source firmware, undocumented and obscure parts, incredibly complex components, and are developed by people with vast domain-specific knowledge. They’re also full of exciting security-impacting technologies like IME, AMT, SMM, TPM, and UEFI. But, despite the apparent difficulty, what if we took a stab at trying to understand these devices and what security looks like at the bare-metal level? The real secret is that it’s not as hard as it looks.