Hackaday has a new blog on the Intel ME, covering recent news, as well as some background history I’d not seen.
[…] To break the Management Engine, though, this code will have to be reverse engineered, and figuring out the custom compression scheme that’s used in the firmware remains an unsolved problem. But unsolved doesn’t mean that people aren’t working on it. There are efforts to break the ME’s Huffman algorithm. Of course, deciphering the code we have would lead to another road block: there is still the code on the inaccessible on-chip ROM. Nothing short of industrial espionage or decapping the chip and looking at the silicon will allow anyone to read the ROM code. While researchers do have some idea what this code does by inferring the functions, there is no way to read and audit it. So the ME remains a black box for now. […]
FYI: This blog was Hackaday’s first UEFI-tagged post. A few others had BIOS tags.
Firmware Security 