About SuperMicro BMC License

Posted on Jul 25, 2023 | Updated on Nov 5, 2023 | 1 minute

Table of contents

TL;DR
The tour to the key and other ways/tools to generate the key

I happend to own one board produced by SuperMicro. It has BMC that can perform out-of-band operations. But the feature requires a license key. It looks like people have already found out how to generate the keys.

TL;DR🔗

For Linux users(like me):

# 'bmc-mac' is your BMC's MAC address, with no space or colon. It's usually on 
# a sticker on the motherboard, and is shown on the web interface of the BMC.
echo -n 'bmc-mac' | xxd -r -p | openssl dgst -sha1 -mac HMAC -macopt hexkey:8544E3B47ECA58F9583043F8 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -c 1-24

And there's a web version.

The tour to the key and other ways/tools to generate the key🔗

Read: Reverse engineering supermicro ipmi

It looks like the BMC runs a customized Linux distro. Really interesting.