While I sometimes use the arguments “in such case e, attacker gains nothing, because it assumes you are already compromised”, one has to be careful with this, because compromise doesn't imply a total compromise.
A simple example (unrelated to ME) of this catch: One might think that giving user full permissions for all the files does not decrease the security if the user can simply sudo anything. While this is not mostly true when considering RCE vulnerabilities (or running a trojan), it doesn't apply to path-traversal-like vulnerability – attacker is not automatically in the position where she can simply call sudo. I don't know ME well, but maybe this catch also applies to ME. Note that whole ME includes not only some persistently running chip and its firmware, it also includes some (optional) software for the OS, which is BTW actually recommended to be removed by the Intel's security advisory. I don't know what is it exactly capable of, it can probably give the admin access to OS shell, and maybe something more. (And BTW, you can see it in dom0 by lsmod.) This just illustrates that ME is actually a complex beast and it's hard to properly reason about it. Regards, Vít Šesták 'v6ak' -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/781d1b38-ec21-40c8-9779-e09f83059462%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
