Well, this just sucks.
This means Microsoft owns my computer. They can access parts of my CPU without my knowledge. WTF, AMD!
Let me suggest you look into something called "Windows Update" which seems to be an intentional backdoor/RCE that Microsoft has baked into their operating system.
Yes, that's what Operating Systems tend to do.
Why are you running an OS from a company you don't trust?
If this processor can be disabled in the BIOS, like existing TPMs typically can be, then does this matter? If Microsoft's "hardware backdoor" is only powered on when using Microsoft's OS anyway then what's the problem?
If this can't be easily turned off, then yes that's absolutely a problem. But there's no evidence that's the case, and would be a divergence from existing TPMs in that regard.
I'm disappointed in the HN crowd going into hysterics when the reality is simple; no hardware module can spy on an OS that knows exactly how the module works and can actively deny it any access.
This can be initiated through the actual "owners" of this chip or the next malware authors that exploit this undocumented black box that received zero scrutiny by the public security community.
The typical backdoor concern for things like Intel's management engine is via ethernet, which it definitely does have access to and is a lot easier for it to stand up & make a connection. But wifi requires credentials or some way for this security chip to inject additional packets. The former isn't really plausible without OS participation, and the latter would be very detectible if it happened.
The owners of the chip can't exactly magic commands directly to the chip, after all. And communication with the outside world is trivially detected unless they go through the extreme cost of giving it its own cell modem or similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
The WiFi could connect to a neighboring device supporting this function. Amazon developed Sidewalk[0] for example. Or my country has an ISP that lets you connect from any of the subscriber's wifi, as long as you pass your credentials. The subscribers can turn this off, but it's opt-out.
So this is two, actual, already deployed mechanism that solves the "how it's sending to the mothership" problem. And I expect more to come - looking at 5G for example.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/24/amazon_sidewalk_opt_o...
I don't think so. If you skim through the Intel ME wiki article, which is one of such systems, it works almost completely independently from the computer, having separate and privileged access to different hardware, like the ethernet card, and doing whatever it pleases - including working while the computer itself is turned off.
The problem we're reacting against is that when these chips exist widely enough, it becomes plausible for others to assert that everyone's computing device has one. At that point it's possible for third parties you want to interact with (eg your bank, government, entertainment provider, or even mundane web service) to start insisting that you use such chip's functionality to prove exactly what software you are running, for their "security" [1]. At which point it becomes impossible to run anything besides approved locked-down proprietary environments when interacting with such services.
As others have said, look at "SafetyNet" on Android. It's new enough that you can still pick banks that don't insist on dictating your computing environment, but with our moribund markets and monkey-see-monkey-do executives, the trend can only go in one direction.
[0] assuming no side channel between it and the network card(s).
[1] which they'll Orwellianly brand as "your security"
It all goes back to the concept of the chain of trust. If a company can vouch for the code all the way from them to where it is running, that is an incredible improvement to security. Apple does it for its encryption and startup sequence, having delegated macOS to a read-only, signed volume on your disk that they can cryptographically guarantee has not been modified one bit. That, to me, is a great improvement in the security of our lives, and our banking.
Since central planning is unscalable, this inherently leads to mandates that are ignorant, arbitrary, and capricious. For example, perhaps a bank makes it against their terms to access your account through a virtual machine, due to a lack of understanding technology and a general worry - it's one more moving part and this user is doing something nonstandard that they don't understand, so to them risk goes way up. Yet I myself do all my banking access in a VM, for various security and practical reasons. But still I don't have to worry about any bank actually attempting to enforce such a clause, since unless they really start digging through my system stats with javascript and/or raw sockets, they won't even have any indicator of such. Whereas remote attestation would allow them to cut right through all of that and enforce such a thing (actually it would prevent it by default), thereby (increasingly) preventing me from operating my personal computing environment how I see fit.
Banning banking through a non-signed OS, sure.
And unlike abstractly debating this stuff in the early 2000's, we have already seen what has occurred with platform signing keys! Increasingly locked down proprietary OS's, arbitrary top-down restrictions on what software can be run, and everpresent centralized control. All in the name of "security" which really means corporate predictability (aka "authoritarianism"). So really your comment is like another asteroid has already hit and obliterated the moon, as was predicted by the same projections, and yet you're still treating the straightforward implication as a hypothetical.
And was your response to my example supposed to be a counterargument? I don't see how general VMs would ever be allowed [0]. But sure assuming they are, go through and replace "VM" with "non signed OS" if you'd like. So I'm supposed to buy and setup MS Windows [1] to access an online bank - simply to appease some out of touch risk assessor?
[0] it would mean verifying arbitrary dom0 OS's (eg NixOS) and arbitrary hypervisors (eg libvirt+kvm)
[1] for which my current security policy is to disallow it from connecting to the Internet after it has touched any personal information
The world can't run on nerd vanity hardware like RaptorComputing POWER workstations and Honeycomb LX2's
It... Totally can? The only problem with Raptor is that they don't make any cheap hardware. In terms of performance and functionally, they're good.
However Intel dabbled with technology much more sinister (SGX) that did exactly what it said exactly on the tin, protecting data from the user of the machine. Unlike MS's track record with Pluton, it was always horribly broken,required a license to attest victim machines and only covered the Intel half of the PC market. The only commercial software I'm aware of that ever mandated SGX is some blu ray player for windows