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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.

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

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:36PM (#454074) Homepage
    Yeah, there was something like that for a zx spectrum too. Happy days.
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  • (Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Sunday January 15 2017, @10:44PM

    by purple_cobra (1435) on Sunday January 15 2017, @10:44PM (#454185)

    Something like this http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Multiface_II [cpcwiki.eu]? That's for an Amstrad CPC but the original was for the Sinclair Spectrum.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday January 16 2017, @01:01AM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday January 16 2017, @01:01AM (#454215) Homepage
      Exactly that - I had forgotten its name. Wow, that brings back memories...
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      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves