Mugwump's Fish World

Purism Now Offers Laptops with Intel's 'Management Engine' Disabled

"San Francisco company Purism announced that they are now offering their Librem laptops with the Intel Management Engine disabled," writes Slashdot reader boudie2. Purism describes Management Engine as "a separate CPU that can run and control a computer even when powered off."

HardOCP reports that Management Engine "is widely despised by security professionals and privacy advocates because it relies on signed and secret Intel code, isn't easily alterable, isn't fully documented, and has been found to be vulnerable to exploitation... In short, it's a tiny potentially hackable computer in your computer that you cannot totally control, nor opt-out of, but it can totally control your system."

Purism writes:
Disabling the Management Engine is no easy task, and it has taken security researchers years to find a way to properly and verifiably disable it. Purism, because it runs coreboot and maintains its own BIOS firmware update process, has been able to release and ship coreboot that disables the Management Engine from running, directly halting the ME CPU without the ability of recovery... "Disabling the Management Engine, long believed to be impossible, is now possible and available in all current Librem laptops. It is also available as a software update for previously shipped recent Librem laptops," says Todd Weaver, Founder & CEO of Purism.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/10/29/0324201/purism-now-offers-laptops-with-intels-management-engine-disabled?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed (https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/10/29/0324201/purism-now-offers-laptops-with-intels-management-engine-disabled?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed)