SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/

Title    Intel Management Engine Partially Defeated
Date    Sunday January 15 2017, @12:21AM
Author    janrinok
Topic   
from the where-there-is-a-will,-there-is-a-way dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/01/13/1833205

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

Links

  1. "The Mighty Buzzard" - mailto:themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org
  2. "Phoronix is reporting" - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-ME-Cleaning
  3. "Libreboot.org." - https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme
  4. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=18002

© Copyright 2024 - SoylentNews, All Rights Reserved

printed from SoylentNews, Intel Management Engine Partially Defeated on 2024-03-28 19:39:31