Pyongyang Night

"A thousand CPUs went dark before dawn."

Pyongyang Night is an open-source OPSEC hardening project focused on disabling known Western surveillance backdoors ("Yankee daemons") in Intel and AMD CPUs. This includes Intel ME, AMD PSP, fTPM, and associated firmware-based threats. It offers guides and tools to permanently neutralize these subsystems and restore sovereignty to your machines.

Overview

Modern x86 systems ship with embedded management controllers that run below the OS level. These controllers—Intel ME and AMD PSP—have unrestricted access to memory, peripherals, and network devices. They are proprietary, closed-source, and required for "Secure Boot" and other platform lockdown mechanisms.

Intel: Removing the Management Engine (ME)

Step 1: Check if your system is vulnerable

Target systems: Intel platforms from 2008–2017 (Core 2 through Skylake/Kaby Lake)
Look for ME version 6.x – 11.x

Step 2: Install dependencies: <syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> sudo apt install flashrom python3 git build-essential </syntaxhighlight>

Step 3: Dump firmware: <syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> flashrom -p internal -r backup.rom </syntaxhighlight>

Step 4: Clean ME using me_cleaner: <syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> git clone https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner.git cd me_cleaner python3 me_cleaner.py -S ../backup.rom -o cleaned.rom </syntaxhighlight>

Step 5: Flash cleaned firmware: <syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> flashrom -p internal -w cleaned.rom </syntaxhighlight>

AMD: Disabling the Platform Security Processor (PSP)

Step 1: Disable fTPM in BIOS Step 2: Disable Secure Boot Step 3: Monitor PSP activity (Linux): <syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> dmesg | grep -i psp </syntaxhighlight>

Follow community projects:

Recommended Tools

Post-Cleanup OPSEC Practices

Use Qubes, Tails, or Whonix for ops
Use air-gapped systems where possible
Avoid fTPM/Secure Boot systems

Contributions

We welcome new methods to disable Yankee Daemons. Submit tools, firmware dumps, or testing results via pull request.

"The boot ROM is the only God I fear."

Pyongyang night

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