Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode (Positive Technologies)

Posted Aug 30, 2017 16:53 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953)
In reply to: Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode (Positive Technologies) by ncm
Parent article: Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode (Positive Technologies)

I agree completely but I doubt the spooks had any influence on this. It's all enterprise driving this. Although I'm sure the NSA appreciates the vulnerabilities you need to remember they also have to protect their own systems and bugs in the ME won't stay in only their hands. It's in their interest to see any bugs patched because of the potential for spying against their own systems.

Enterprise customers are demanding these features, the ME allows you to provision any computer remotely and perform reboots, bios edits and anything else you can think of short of replacing hardware. The big companies want this and they pay Intel's exorbitant fee to turn the ME on because even though the ME runs at all times you can't actually use it without paying Intel.

Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode (Positive Technologies)

Posted Aug 31, 2017 0:45 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

"I agree completely but I doubt the spooks had any influence on this."

That strikes me as exceptionally naive. I suspect the spooks work at Intel and have many friends and contacts that work at Intel. And in various enterprise software development groups, and related journalistic organizations. The spooks in my estimation have tremendous ability to influence very precisely this sort of thing. To imagine they all choose not to leverage that influence... yeah, can't see it.

"the ME allows you to provision any computer remotely and perform reboots, bios edits and anything else you can think of short of replacing hardware."

I'm skeptical of this assertion. bios edits are just writing bits, I'm quite certain that long ago I saw pre-ME era computers that could manage that. Likewise a reboot-on-magic-lancookie KISS alternative for rebooting sounds like something I would trust more. If this was all innocent of any consciousness of decreased security for users, they would let the FOSS community freely analyze and enhance the code. But no, I imagine the spooks are quite happy hoarding that ability as much as they can for as long as they can. And my money is on them having entrenched themselves two layers deeper by the time the FOSS community gets into the security enhancement game of ME code. I mean, we witnessed how the Snowden story was reacted to by the government.