> Intel ME's basic function is to display your monitor over network, monitor some hardware temp sensors, and reset the motherboard while your main Intel CPU is

> Intel ME's basic function is to display your monitor over network, monitor some hardware temp sensors, and reset the motherboard while your main Intel CPU is running or suspended (or even powered down). No, that's AMT, which is an optional feature not enabled on the majority of devices with an ME. On an average system it's much more likely that the ME is being used for PTT (Intel's implementation of a TPM running on the ME, avoiding the cost of an additional TPM chip), a protected video path for DRMed video (the encrypted video is passed to the ME, which decrypts it and draws it to the screen without the decrypted content ever being visible to the host CPU) and various other low-level platform integration things. You don't need source code to verify the behaviour of a binary. The vulnerabilities that have been identified in ME code didn't depend on researchers having source code. Can we be certain that the ME isn't doing something malicious? No. But nor could we be certain even if we had the source code (maybe the microarchitecture was modified so that a specific sequences of instructions would cause the next cmp operation to invert , for example). Nobody's found any evidence of malice, and not really any more incompetence than you'd expect.