You never heard of intel IME or amd PSP?
It's a mips microprocessor inside your cpu, completely undocumented and has access to the memory, peripherals, network interface etc.
It's a mips microprocessor inside your cpu, completely undocumented and has access to the memory, peripherals, network interface etc.
They were documented in the sense Intel publicly advertised them for years under AMT and vPro as enterprise features. That's why all the discussions on HN about whether Intel had backdoors or weakened randomness were funny. While people were "countering misinformation" here, Intel was publicly advertising backdoors in their chips to ease the management burden. I mean, I guess you could call them front doors with the publicity.
The sneaky part was how they started including them in all chips without a way to (a) buy chips without them or (b) know for sure you could turn them off. I immediately suspected NSA paying them off given most of this started in Trusted Computing Group activities which included classified sessions with NSA. They were always a stakeholder in that stuff. AMD did it, too.
Our only hope for x86 now is the Chinese company that's sharing AMD's chips. They might make a chip with no U.S. backdoors: only Chinese backdoors. If you're worried about local government but not I.P. theft, then the Chinese backdoors won't be any threat to you. Problem solved if the computers get here with no interdiction. Gotta do shell games.
Are you sure you didn't confuse that with the processor serial number (that Intel actually reversed their decision on)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870
TPM was (unfortunately?) far more positively received, likely because it was marketed as a security instead of DRM feature --- and the same goes for a lot of other antiuser features today... the manufacturers have gotten smart about it.
This was unfortunate as it largely evaporated the middle ground who recognized that without some trusted base you also can’t recover from malware or have robust anti-theft measures. I wish the politics had been such that we ended up with a robust open-source implementation before so much shoddy, unreviewed code had shipped so widely.
Not necessarily. It's possible your local government has infiltrated the Chinese agencies that have access to your data. Maybe not likely, but possible. It's also possible the Chinese might choose to sell that data to your government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(processor)
Later versions of the Intel ME switched to an internally-designed 80486.