Yet another reason to boycott Intel
Summary: The dark hearts of computers, with a lot of secrets and circuitry whose behaviour cannot be verified, are also convenient back doors, even without additional bugs (implanted en route)
THE FSF has this interesting new article about "Active Management Technology". It was written by Ward Vandewege, Matthew Garrett, and Richard M. Stallman, who awarded Garrett for his work on UEFI.
One year ago, around the same time that Snowden leaked some NSA documents, we
warned that UEFI could be used to remotely brick PCs. Later on, after the NSA leaks had gone maintream, the NSA
pretty much confirmed it was a possible strategy (but defecting this to the Chinese). Going back to 2008
we also warned about back doors, some of which facilitated by broken encryption in hardware (e.g. Intel's 'hardware-accelerated' RNG). That was about a decade after Microsoft had allegedly built back doors into Windows (we know that there are back doors now, but it's just hard to say when Microsoft started it).
We already wrote a great deal about the problem with UEFI patents, UEFI 'secure' boot (taking control over computers, moving control away from the users to put itinto corporate hands and governments), but we have not done much to cover UEFI remote control capabilities, or more broadly Intel's rogue role in intelligence, leading to a ban in some places (some variants of BSD refuse to use Intel RNGs due to fear of intentionally low entropy that derails encryption).
Quoting the article from Vandewege
et al.: "Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) is a proprietary remote management and control system for personal computers with Intel CPUs. It is dangerous because it has full access to personal computer hardware at a very low level, and its code is secret and proprietary."
Intel is a
deeply criminal company, so to blindly trust its proprietary technology would be foolish. We have always campaigned against Intel not just because "intel" is shorthand for something rather insinuative although this latter point is now a growing factor, too. Watch what China is doing these days when it comes to hardware policy, not just software policy. Or simply watch what Snowden has been leaking; it's rather revealing.
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