| Occam’s razor. I’m a very conspiratorial person and I’ve seen nothing to suggest any nefarious activity or collusion so I’m not getting carried away on this. https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/executive-perspectives/a... This is a statement by the Intel CTO from 2016 on the ME discussions, and briefly reassured us that Intel is conscious of the security of the ME, and that they have teams dedicated to it and can push firmware updates out to cover vulnerabilities. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec... Intel made an official announcement in May that they have discovered an escalation of privilege vulnerability and are addressing it accordingly as you would expect. It also notes that consumer hardware and firmware is not affected by the vulnerability, demonstrating that Intel actually does release two different chips, and prioritizes privacy and security more over features on the consumer models. https://newsroom.intel.com/news/important-security-informati... Intel releases a software tool for checking if your system is one of the vulnerable units or not, they have a fix already for the firmware and confirm it is not due to physical design flaws, and are working with manufacturers to push the updates ASAP. Overall, I don’t feel like Intel is at all intentionally sabatoging it’s customers, and genuinely considers the ME a valued feature by consumers, even though it bothers me that one is included on every product, they do differ and consumer models have fewer privileges than business models, which seems to be more of a firmware design than a hardware design, so I tend to believe that they simply don’t design extra chips without the ME and instead lock it down more on a software level. Vulnerabilities also appear to be firmware based, and the extremely vague announcement by black hat doesn’t suggest otherwise either. Intel very obviously takes the security of their devices very seriously and makes themselves available to users who need help identifying whether or not they’re vulnerable and what to do about it. |