Awesome, I like your response. I definitely agree that there are many ways to take this. But, some of the risk factors that you are comparing aren't really on t

Awesome, I like your response. I definitely agree that there are many ways to take this. But, some of the risk factors that you are comparing aren't really on the same level. To go back to a bad metaphor again :), what if I stuck a camera with encrypted feeds in your house that you couldn't remove, but I told you that they weren't attached to anything? and that you could just push this button to turn them off? See, the light goes off. That means it's off. Why are you so distrusting? What if they were in every room? over your bed? As you move downward into more primitive levels of the system, or outward to edge parts of the system (ie a usb attachment), it becomes harder to see what's going on. For example: let's say that you p0wned the firmware on a non-boot SATA drive. You could see all the bits flying across, but you can't do much about them except tamper with them; they might be encrypted, or you maybe can't get access to the network in order to ship them off elsewhere. There's probably ways around each of those, but it's hard. But what if I took a Raspberry Pi and stuck it on the system bus? that's a different story :) When you have a multi-megabyte secondary server and processor that's hooked directly into your system bus, watching everything that comes across and able to subtly react, tamper, watch just for keys, or ship data off elsewhere, then (as you point out) the attack vectors multiply compared to a exploiting a device's firmware. And, you can't ever get rid of them. EVER. No amount of flashing will fix it, because you can't flash it anyway. (That's why I posted the libreboot IntelME link). What if just the hardware RNG (rdrand) watched for a particular sequence of bits to come into some registers, and then started spitting out a predictable sequence for random numbers? What if this wasn't even a crazy conspiracy theory? (It's not, as we know now, although we don't know the exact mechanism that hardware RNG's are owned by). :( > The IME just allows your computer to do the bidding of some arbitrary third-party that Intel likes (like DRM companies), instead of the code needing to be written by Intel themselves, embedded deep in the CPU's internals. Yes, agreed - that's a radically different level of surface area. Any firmware can be reflashed, but this isn't just any firmware; this is firmware that connects everything together. This is literally the heart of the system. And it's completely locked off from our even viewing it, let alone choosing not to using it. > If you're an end-user and own your computer, you can disable AMT, and verify that it's disabled—the computer will no longer reply to probes on that port Agreed, but you originally said you can disable IME, and that's all I was really taking issue with :) Disabling AMT still leaves IME: what is it doing? You don't know, and we'll never tell you ;) > Everything else is just a dozen new vectors for motivated attackers to do things motivated attackers have always been able to do. Agreed. :( Thank you for the interesting discussion! It'd be fun to relax and argue about it sometime in person. :)