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I am worried about the firmware of Intel processors which I believe have had firmware since the mid-1990s or a bit later. Is this possible and are there tools "in the wild" that are capable of doing this? Does Intel do some sort of checksum to ensure that this cannot happen?

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Not sure whether you're referring to CPU microcode or the OS in the management engine.

Microcode is remarkably tiny and heavily encrypted. I've never heard of anyone dropping hints as to what's in it, so if that's permeable at all I get the impression you'd probably have to have some rather nice friends to learn about it.

Regarding ME security, here's some interesting info I found a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13782508

Thank you. I was thinking about CPU microcode, but the problem would apply to the ME, I'd guess.

Seems to me the CPU microcode could be hackable given NSA or Israeli govt resources.

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