Some ships with it enabled, but it can be disabled not to use it at all, like on the Lenovo x200.Ī collaborative effort to neutralize the ME has found some success, see here.Some ships without it enabled(that means that the hardware is not used).Some of theses don't have a management engine.The List of supported mainboard list some of them. However coreboot also support other systems than the ones with recent intel CPU/chipsets. So even if some people partially documented some ME firmware format, there is very few probability of having a free software replacement for it one day. Power glitches(by the ec) while the ME is checking its firmware is probably not practically doable.On recent chipset its RAM region is locked while it is allocated.The ME bootrom checks the firmware signature.Replacing the ME firmware is not that easy because: If ME firmware is absent, the computer freezes about 30min after boot.The ME can be disabled (no Fimrware is run by it).Controls the computer's original networking adapters.Has access to the computer's memory/RAM.Disabled: No Ethernet controller fimrware.Inside the ethernet controller, disabled: no Ethernet controller fimrware.See Intel_82573_Ethernet_controller for more details. The Ethernet controller is capable of running some fimrwares( like AMT 1.0), but the hardware is not configured to do it on that machine. In addition to obvious attack vectors (the ME could be used by an adversary to spy on the PC user, tamper with their documents, etc), it could also potentially be used to alter the contents of the motherboard's BIOS flash chip, thereby polluting Coreboot builds based upon extracting the contents of that flash chip.The ME has access to a lot of things, see 'physical capabilities' column below for more details.a handful of Intel staff (and possibly government agents). Therefore, it cannot easily be audited, tested, or replaced, except by those people with access to the relevant private keys, i.e. The code that is running inside the management engine is proprietary and signed.initializes the hardware, before the boot firmware(BIOS/EFI/UEFI/Coreboot/etc.).

See the Wikipedia AMT article for example use cases.

permits out of band management of the computer.

The Intel Management Engine (abbreviated 'ME') is a CPU which: 7 Using a smaller version of the Intel ME.5 Why there is no replacement for it yet.

Management engine