Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Intel Management Engine Partially Defeated

posted by janrinok on Sunday January 15 2017, @12:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-there-is-a-will,-there-is-a-way dept.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

In some shiny good news to us of the tinfoil hat crew, Phoronix is reporting:

Many free software advocates have been concerned by Intel's binary-only Management Engine (ME) built into the motherboards on newer generations of Intel motherboards. The good news is there is now a working, third-party approach for disabling the ME and reducing the risk of its binary blobs.

Via an open-source, third-party tool called me_cleaner it's possible to partially deblob Intel's ME firmware images by removing any unnecessary partitions from the firmware, reducing its ability to interface with the system. The me_cleaner works not only with free software firmware images like Coreboot/Libreboot but can also work with factory-blobbed images. I was able to confirm with a Coreboot developer that this program can disable the ME on older boards or devices with BootGuard and disable Secure Boot. This is all done with a Python script.

Those unfamiliar with the implications on Intel's ME for those wanting a fully-open system can read about it on Libreboot.org.

Looks like I may not have to go ARM on my next desktop build after all.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Intel Management Engine Partially Defeated | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 39 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by driven on Sunday January 15 2017, @12:41AM

    by driven (6295) on Sunday January 15 2017, @12:41AM (#453969)

    Like the AMT application, these DRM applications, which in themselves are defective by design, demonstrate the omnipotent capabilities of the ME: this hardware and its proprietary firmware can access and control everything that is in RAM and even everything that is shown on the screen.

    I won't pretend to know much about CPU internals, but that last statement of its "omnipotent" capability reminded me of the Super Snapshot [pcmuseum.ca] cartridge for Commodore 64 computers. You could freeze execution of whatever was running, debug it, modify it, save it to disk as a runnable snapshot file that would resume the program at the point when it was interrupted. It could even scan memory before and after losing a life in a game and often was able to auto-detect what memory location had to be modified to give you infinite lives. I've always missed that kind of functionality with PCs.
    Sorry, couldn't help take a trip down memory lane. :)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   4  

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @12:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @12:46AM (#453970)

    Blah blah blah.
    Soylentnews is Old people.

    Get with the times, dinosaur! If you don't have an embedded keylogger tweeting everything you text, you're too old live.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:05AM (#453973)

    I remember the days when you could manually POKE memory to do codes. But make sure you check the parameters correctly, otherwise you could get some interesting results. I remember a friend of mine that wrote a program that would randomly change the memory of program just out of the curiosity of what would happen.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @03:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @03:03AM (#453993)

      You can still do that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @05:48AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @05:48AM (#454018)

      Now it's called Cortana.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:36PM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:36PM (#454074) Homepage
    Yeah, there was something like that for a zx spectrum too. Happy days.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves