Re: [Libreboot-dev] about Intel ME

[Serge]

Hi everybody,
Our discussion become even more important in the light of the new
hacking scandal.
Somebody hacked the Hacking Team,
according to Wiki its private sector company that sells its services
to individual and even oppressive governments that violate human
rights.
> Hacking Team has been criticized for selling its products and services to 
> governments with poor human rights records, including Sudan, Bahrain, and 
> Saudi Arabia.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team

They have dangerous exploits capable of penetration of firmware like
routers and even of permanent infection of UEFI ROM modules, making
impossible to clean the machine, just by reformatting / reinstalling
the OS.
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/hacking-team-uses-uefi-bios-rootkit-to-keep-rcs-9-agent-in-target-systems/

Thats why technology like Intel ME should never exist.
Just lets assume that somebody did hack into the Intel ME and is
capable to get remote control over the system...


On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Serge <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Also woth mentioning is the SPARC--there are multiple implementations
>> (LEON, T1, S1, T2) that for which the VHDL/Verilog source files are
>> GPL licensed.
> As far as I understand, the SPARC source code published by SUN is very
> well adapted to ASICs.
>
> Processors like the LEON(which is based on it if I remember well) are
> instead adapted to FPGAs.
>
> We also have other free software CPU and SOCs such as:
> - The Milkymist SOC, with a good DDR3 RAM controller.
> - RiscV.
> - Many other.
>
> As fabricating an ASIC is still incredibly expensive, we would need
> many buyers if we go this road.
>
> In the meantime, we have FPGAs.
> The issue is that there is no free software compiler-equivalent[1] for
> most FPGAs. As far as I know, the only FPGA family with one is the ICE40
> from Lattice.
>
> References:
> -----------
> [1]To build software you use a compiler, like GCC. This transforms the
>    source code in a binary that you can run.
>    FPGAs have something very similar called "synthesizer': This
>    transform the hardware description language source(VHDL, Veriblog),
>    in a binary that will configure the FPGA.
>
> Denis.