System76 disables Intel Management Engine on proprietary systems via patch

The American computer company System76 has announced that it wants to disable the Intel Management Engine on its systems via a patch. The announcement follows vulnerabilities Intel found in an audit of its ME code.

In a blog post, System76 writes that the patches are its answer to the disclosure of the vulnerabilities by Intel. Disabling the Management Engine should not cause any problems on his systems, as it does not perform any function there. Users are eligible for the patch if they are running Ubuntu or the System76-developed Linux distribution Pop!_OS. They have to approve the update themselves; it is not automatically implemented. Removal is done using the me_cleaner tool, an employee of the company explains on Reddit.

The removal is possible because researchers at the security company Positive Technologies discovered that it is possible to disable the Management Engine through an undocumented function. System76 customers with desktops will receive an email from the company with instructions; users with a laptop will receive the update automatically.

The American company is not the first party to take such a step. Purism, which supplies open source laptops, among other things, announced in October that it will ship its upcoming Librem 13 and 15 laptops with the Management Engine turned off. There will also be patches for existing models. The Intel Management Engine is a separate microcontroller that is part of the Platform Controller Hub, or pch, of Intel CPUs, which accesses communication between the CPU and peripherals. This separate processor works separately from the CPU itself and is therefore accessible when the CPU itself is turned off.

Vulnerabilities in the engine, for example, allow attackers to run code on a system without the target being aware of it. Intel’s feature has long been criticized for which there is little documentation. For the recently found vulnerabilities, most patches will not be available until 2018, it recently emerged.