[ihalip]

> billions of devices in the wild which will become e-waste overnight

Not just e-waste, they can also become a huge liability. In a presentation, the authors mention that one of the CPU families which have this vulnerability were used in Tesla cars. Tesla apparently switched to AMD APUs around December 2021.

[alophawen]

AMD have much the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

[astrange]

This is about microcode, not the Intel ME. AMD does also have updatable microcode though.

[stefan_]

AMD processors have much the same backdoor-"management" coprocessors. Just about the only processors without this stuff is your own softcore design running on an FPGA.

[femto]

Then you have to worry about any "management" modes on the FPGA.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/Silicon_scan_draft.pdf

[_kbh_]

At least for AMD the PSP isn’t externally exposed which means the attack surface is drastically reduced.

[rkangel]

This is not about the management engine. Microcode is part of the actual core processor itself, but an updatable layer. One sort off correct mental model might be to think of x64 hardware as being a RISC-ish processor that runs microcode that runs your code.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

What about POWER?

[greggsy]

It’s not a backdoor until it’s proven that it’s used for that propose. Until the it’s just (yet another) potential side channel.