AMT(8) System Manager's Manual AMT(8)

amt — Abstract Machine Test Utility

amt [-m] [-p] [-q] [-s]

The amt utility is used to verify that the low level functions necessary to enforce requirements of the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) are working correctly.

The amt utility must be executed with sufficient privileges and performs the following tests:

Memory Read and Write
This test allocates between 5% to 10% of physical memory and writes data to it, then reads the memory back to ensure the values written remain unchanged.
Memory Separation and Protection
This test ensures that user space programs cannot read and write to areas of memory that is protected or is not shared.
Privileged Instructions
This test ensures that the enforcement of the property that privileged instructions should only be in supervisor mode is still in effect. The set of privileged instructions tested to confirm this is architecture dependent.

The options are as follows:

Skip the memory test.
Skip the privileged instructions test.
Suppress the screen output.
Skip the memory separation and protection test.

<0
An error occured in executing the tests.
=0
All the tests passed.
>0
The number of tests that failed or were skipped.

The overall result (pass or fail) is logged in the audit trail and system log. The auditd(8) daemon must already be running for the results to be stored in the audit trail file.

One of the above test may be skipped without getting a negative result. A test is skipped either with one of the above command-line options or automatically if there is not a test compatiable with the Target Of Evaluation (TOE). The audit administrator may want to perform the memory test only on startup since it can have large negative impact on the system performance.

audit(2) auditd(8) syslog(3) syslogd(8)

August 14, 2008 macOS 15.2