> collaboration between Intel and three letter agencies. thats part and parcel for any large US-based IT company these days. > since the ME firmware is store

> collaboration between Intel and three letter agencies. thats part and parcel for any large US-based IT company these days. > since the ME firmware is stored on SPI flash, When you're Intel, you make the IC's and you can put whatever you want in there. If they were in bed with TLA's, I'd expect the pilfered keys would be stored in a sliver of NVM gates deep inside the die (in which chip, I can't say, perhaps in the CPU itself) (and probably encrypted with their own secret key). That's why I suggest that it would be easy to overwrite them just by constantly running aes with fresh random keys.