Lynn McGuire wrote:


My conspiracy theorist son thinks that the CIA paid Intel to put the ME
in to give them a backdoor. He has a total disgust for the CIA since
his involvement with them in Iraq (he is former USMC).

I suspect that AMD has their own version of the ME that has not been
found yet.

Lynn

If AMD has a capability, they're being pretty quiet about it.

They have a security processor inside their newer processors,
which is an ARM in an x86 main processor. But that by itself
isn't enough to build a really great back door.

That might be enough to do some TPM functions, verify the BIOS
hasn't been tampered with.

But when it comes time to remote in, what plumbing is there
to help the remote-in ?

I haven't seen any evidence of "plumbing" on the AMD platform,
a dedicated hardware path like Intel has set up. Sure, you can
simply share all the regular system resources, but that makes
it harder to do (could mean custom firmware, meaning poor
central control of the uniformity of the feature set). How
would two processors handle the interrupt handler for the NIC,
if the NIC has a single head and no filter table, identifying
packets destined for each processor ? And you can't make a tiny
security processor "gate" all the incoming and outgoing traffic, as
people might notice :-) The AMD security processor might have a higher
MIPS rating than the Intel one, but I'm not convinced you wouldn't
notice. It would mean messing with the interrupt table, preventing
the main processor from seeing the real NIC. A mess. And AMD boards
probably have RealTek NICs on them.

Paul