Nonetheless, our research team (Dmitry Sklyarov, Mark Ermolov, and Maxim Goryachy)
Dmitry Sklyarov! There's a name I haven't seen in a while... good to see he's still actively doing this stuff.
The immense complexity of the base firmware and hardware in a modern system is astonishing. XML, MINIX, and three(!) complete 486 cores in the PCH.
Given this amazing feat of engineering, and the goals of the ME, it makes me wonder what people would be willing to work on it --- "making the nooses on which to hang ourselves", as the saying goes --- and if perhaps some of those people are actually not too approving of the idea and would, given an opportunity to do it without consequences to themselves, do a Snowden and leak everything that they could...
The fact that such an "ME killswitch" exists doesn't surprise me either; in this case it seems to be an actual feature, but putting such functionalty into debug/test modes is not uncommon. It was only a matter of time before someone would find it.
Dmitry Sklyarov! There's a name I haven't seen in a while... good to see he's still actively doing this stuff.
The immense complexity of the base firmware and hardware in a modern system is astonishing. XML, MINIX, and three(!) complete 486 cores in the PCH.
Given this amazing feat of engineering, and the goals of the ME, it makes me wonder what people would be willing to work on it --- "making the nooses on which to hang ourselves", as the saying goes --- and if perhaps some of those people are actually not too approving of the idea and would, given an opportunity to do it without consequences to themselves, do a Snowden and leak everything that they could...
The fact that such an "ME killswitch" exists doesn't surprise me either; in this case it seems to be an actual feature, but putting such functionalty into debug/test modes is not uncommon. It was only a matter of time before someone would find it.