It's not a perfect solution but maybe it's a reasonable place to draw the line, until we have open source hardware processors using RISC-V or something.

Could a user tell it's happening? What signals would indicate this? Is it increased CPU usage disguised as a system process?

And are you talking about mainstream proprietary OS'es like MacOS and Windows? I already know a little about Intel ME and proprietary silicon, but I don't know where to find a proper analysis, or a blog or book that deep dives into the ramificitions of the existense of these backdoors.

It seems to also not be in the mainstream consciousness just how serious it could be?

It's not for lack of trying; the lack of adoption is because Intel is actively hostile to efforts like these and they hold all the cards.

You did read the linked article about how the Intel ME essentially makes an open firmware impossible unless/until Intel decides to help us out, right?

Maybe once the Chinese or some other adversary get caught using this backdoor to steal secrets, or decide to brick a few million systems remotely, just maybe then security will be considered over spyability.

I hope that in the future some manufacturer(s) start making fully open source verifiably secure RISC-V (or ARM) processors, and that we have a migration over to that.

See performance benchmarks incomparison with AMD/Intel at: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t...https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t...

The ironic thing is that OP's posted article were news from 2009. Now, a decade later, we almost expect another total Intel CPU failure every year due to all the problems the architecture had while still promising sandboxed security.

But, as with all self-claimed "secure systems". If there's no audit, it cannot be seen as unsecure. Security through obscurity is pretty much the definition of how the hardware sector protects their IP these days.

And, of course, RISC V will be the solution. But honestly, I stopped believing in it years ago. As long as there's no computer system available in the same price range as the market leaders (aka Intel and AMD), you can forget about it.

My 2012 T420's work just fine as daily drivers for anything work or personal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15510428

What's the threat model and what would be your signal to go start using them and abandoning your presumably more modern system, and how would you keep the software on them secure? Will you use Gentoo, given that Debian has dropped PPC?

Broken SSL => MITMer can possibly negotiate insecure and read your traffic anyway. MITMer can also possibly cause a denial-of-service, or get arbitrary code execution on that one chip that controls your entire CPU.

If I had to choose, I would take the first option.

(This precludes options like removing the IME entirely, or updating it to a version with non-broken SSL.)

But honestly, the best argument here is don’t trust anyone; In theory anyone can inspect the source code and binaries for Corebooted devices. It’s not perfect and there’s obviously cases where you can never be 100% sure there’s no tricks, but IMO it’s still a lot better than the alternative of having roughly the same drawbacks but no visibility.

I’m not sure where this fits in in the grand scheme of things though, because in all honesty trust in computing seems like it’s an unending rabbit hole ripe for abuse. Intel ME may even have been born with genuinely good intentions, but I do think it’s secretive, blackbox nature is the absolute worst part of it all.

(Obligatory disclaimer, I work for Google, all of these opinions are just my personal opinions.)

Sadly enough I think this is a good point. You could say it's the same as saying closed source software and operating systems would be better for that reason, which I wouldn't agree with at all, but this would feel somewhat different.

You would have to force GPL like sharing of modified firmware, but it seems much more involved to verify this on a vendor to vendor basis than say, finding that Lenovo ships some nefarious Windows software preinstalled. As an enthusiast you can just reflash after purchase to be sure, but the average consumer might suffer.

It sucks but the only real solution I see is to just remove these things altogether again.

Vendors already fuse their keys using bootguard. So if they want to install rootkits, they can do that now. Lenovo already did that with superfish. Bootguard doesn't make any assurances about the quality of the bios. It just says to the consumer that this machine's bios came from the vendor. Sort of like the https padlock.

I think what you mean to ask is how we could ensure the integrity of the boot flow up to the OS without bootguard. It can be done higher up in the stack. Chromebooks do it pretty well. There are other projects like heads that do it as well. Your chain of trust needs to extend into the OS for it to be meaningful.