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ME Analyzer – Intel Engine Firmware Analysis Tool (github.com/platomav)
80 points by walterbell on Aug 25, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


Can someone explain what the point of this tool is? What are they trying to discover with the database of ME versions?


Intel Management engine built into modern Intel CPUs is closed source software that has full control over your computer.

We need to be able to inspect with tools inside the ME code. This should help.

See also research paper by Joanna Rutkowska - Intel x86 considered harmful http://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf


Nice, but "Windows" as a dependency is a bit too much for my taste.


Your replies make it seem like you think others owe you something. As you're aware, nobody here is trying to "sell" you the project in an attempt to get you interested. I don't know why when someone shares a project they find interesting, people come out waving their little OS flags "but it doesn't run on my Amiga".


you are welcome to port to linux, it's GPLv3


I think this kind of reply makes it to easy for open source software, because any criticism directed to it can be countered with "patches welcome".


"Patches welcome" is a much better state of affairs than "your platform is obscure and not worth supporting."


The substantial difference between those two things is often nil.


"patches welcome" imply "implement it yourself" as does a simple "not supported" or "wont fix".

Following the "patches welcome" logic to the extreme, you would never need anymore than a touring complete language, because you could implement everything yourself.

Of course you don't need to implement as much with free software as with closed one and that is great, but you need to invest time before you can use it and it is valid to criticize that fact.


I'm not sure why you couldn't just run it in a VM.


Ok, thats an option. But I am not sure it its worth the effort.

Normally if I discover some interesting project, that I want to try out, I just check it out in /tmp, run it and then decide if I want to continue using it and install it or just remove it. Setting up a ~20GB VM takes time and diskspace.

Also I looked at the source for a bit and from what I see it only needs the winapi to set the title of a console window, so in theory it should be platform independent if that is removed. Not sure it is, because it does a lot of other stuff.

Just as I said, nice project, but I am afraid its not for me in its current state.


Perhaps because the OS-specific component (UEFIFind.exe) requires access to the real hardware?


UEFIFind would be available for other platforms too: https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool




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