as vendor ID and manufacturer, of potentially replaceable devices. A sensor data record (SDR) repository provides the properties of the individual sensors present on the board. For example, the board may contain sensors for temperature, fan speed, and voltage. Baseboard management controller The baseboard management controller (BMC) provides the intelligence in the IPMI architecture. It is a specialized microcontroller embedded on the motherboard of a computer – generally a server. The BMC manages the interface between system-management software and platform hardware. BMC has its dedicated firmware and RAM. Different types of sensors built into the computer system report to the BMC on parameters such as temperature, cooling fan speeds, power status, operating system (OS) status, etc. The BMC monitors the sensors and can send alerts to a system administrator via the network if any of the parameters do not stay within pre-set limits, indicating a potential failure of the system. The administrator can also remotely communicate with the BMC to take some corrective actions – such as resetting or power cycling the system to get a hung OS running again. These abilities reduce the total cost of ownership of a system. Systems compliant with IPMI version 2.0 can also communicate via serial over LAN, whereby serial console output can be remotely viewed over the LAN. Systems implementing IPMI 2.0 typically also include KVM over IP, remote virtual media and out-of-band embedded web-server interface functionality, although strictly speaking, these lie outside of the scope of the IPMI interface standard. Physical interfaces to the BMC include SMBuses, an RS-232 serial console, address and data lines and an IPMB, that enables the BMC to accept IPMI request messages from other management controllers in the system. A direct serial connection to the BMC is not encrypted as the connection itself is secure. Connection to the BMC over LAN may or may not use encryption depending on the security concerns of the user. There are rising concerns about general security regarding BMCs as a closed infrastructure. OpenBMC is a Linux Foundation Collaborative open-source BMC project. Security Historical issues On 2 July 2013, Rapid7 published a guide to security penetration testing of the latest IPMI 2.0 protocol and implementations by various vendors. Some sources in 2013 were advising against using the older version of IPMI, due to security concerns related to the design and vulnerabilities of Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs). However, like for any other management