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Yes, it absolutely can. However, the first part of good opsec is not lying to yourself about its shortfalls. Fantasy is thinking you can have a "fully open sour
by justinjlynn 7y ago
Yes, it absolutely can. However, the first part of good opsec is not lying to yourself about its shortfalls. Fantasy is thinking you can have a "fully open source firmware" for x86 systems, it just isn't - unless it's leaving out major parts of system initialisation and monitoring. Of course you can remove bits and pieces from the ME, but you can't guarantee that'll always be the case - Intel may not let you do so in the future when the next major microcode update comes out. That said, if you're going for cost cutting and as such you're willing to compromise on opsec, you won't beat major established VPN services on cost. That said, cost is a balance, but costs change - as a VPN provider, for your users - opsec is forever.
- nickik 7y agoYou can in theory. In practice buying hardware that is 10x more expensive is not really viable. Mullvad is already fairly specialized mostly for privacy nerds and there are just not enough people who car about the potential security of Intel ME. Improving the state-of-the-art step by step on the platform that dominates the market will lead to more security gain overall then using what is essentially specialized hardware.
- justinjlynn 7y agoYou and I could probably debate at length the merits of the trade-offs involved and the effect such trade-offs would have on fulfilling any given threat model. The point I was making is that it's not 10x as expensive now, it's probably 3-4x, and that cost is likely to become lower in the future anyhow. It's not specialised in the sense that it's single purpose - it's niche, so, the implication of "special purpose" in the computing sense, as in limited in functionaly for the purpose of greatly improved performance for specific tasks, doesn't really apply.