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Intel: We've Found Severe Bugs in Secretive Management Engine, Affecting Millions (zdnet.com)
Liam Tung, writing for ZDNet: Thanks to an investigation by third-party researchers into Intel's hidden firmware in certain chips, Intel decided to audit its firmware and on Monday confirmed it had found 11 severe bugs that affect millions of computers and servers. The flaws affect Management Engine (ME), Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Server Platform Services (SPS). Intel discovered the bugs after Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov from security firm Positive Technologies found a critical vulnerability in the ME firmware that Intel now says would allow an attacker with local access to execute arbitrary code. The researchers in August published details about a secret avenue that the US government can use to disable ME, which is not available to the public. Intel ME has been a source of concern for security-minded users, in part because only Intel can inspect the firmware, yet many researchers suspected the powerful subsystem had bugs that were ripe for abuse by attackers.
Yes. Everything after about 2006 does to varying extent.
As the one who outed the 10+ year AMT bug a few months ago, Intel's ''security' policy is a joke. No it is worse than that, it is willfully malign. They know how to do the right thing but they refuse to do so for whatever reason. I have been begging them for quite literally years not to be abjectly stupid on TXT and ME security issues but they just get worse. You are seeing the tip of the iceberg, wait for the hardware issues you can't patch to be found....
-Charlie
There have been remote attacks capable of provisioning AMT in the wild. Intel conveniently does not acknowledged them in their NDA documents about security for some reason, can calls users with AMT turned off 'safe'. Take from that what you will about their priorities when it comes to customer's security.
Intel can't say their chips don't have a back door. They also haven't said their chips don't have a back door so at least they are honest.
AMD is working on greater disclosure and I am prodding them as hard as I can. Internally they seem to be doing the right things, or at least trying to.
ARM has their full code base published on Github. This doesn't prevent licensees from using something else, adding nefarious things etc, but I can almost guarantee most don't. You can always checksum the code if you want.
As an aside, AMD's PSP is based on ARM's stuff which is completely open source. I am fairly sure that the majority of AMD's code in this area is unchanged from the vanilla ARM version so you could consider AMD's partially open.
-Charlie