SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 19, 2017 — Purism’s Librem Laptops, running coreboot, are now available with the Intel Management Engine completely and verifiably disabled.

“Disabling the Management Engine, long believed to be impossible, is now possible and available in all current Librem laptops, it is also available as a software update for previously shipped recent Librem laptops.” says Todd Weaver, Founder & CEO of Purism.

The Management Engine (ME), part of Intel AMT, is a separate CPU that can run and control a computer even when powered off. The ME has been the bane of the security market since 2008 on all Intel based CPUs, with publicly released exploits against it, is now disabled by default on all Purism Librem laptops.

Disabling the Management Engine is no easy task, and it has taken security researchers years to find a way to properly and verifiably disable it. Purism, because it runs coreboot and maintains its own BIOS firmware update process has been able to release and ship coreboot that disables the Management Engine from running, directly halting the ME CPU without the ability of recovery.

“Purism Librem laptops were already the most secure current Intel based computers available on the market today, but disabling the management engine solidifies that statement clearly.” says Zlatan Todoric, CTO of Purism.

The Librem 13 and Librem 15 products can be purchased today and will arrive with the Management Engine disabled by default, and it can be verified to be disabled with the source code released to confirm the disablement is accurate. Showing “ME: FW Partition Table : BAD; ME: Bringup Loader Failure : YES”

“Purism, in the long-term pursuit of liberating hardware at the lowest levels, still has more work to do. Removing the management engine entirely is the next step beyond just disabling it. Coreboot also includes another binary, the Intel FSP, a less worrisome but still important binary to liberate, incorporating a free vBIOS is another step Purism plans to take. The road to a completely free system on current Intel CPUs is not over, but the largest step of disabling the Management Engine is arguably the largest milestone to cross.” says Youness Alaoui, Hardware Enablement Developer at Purism.

See also: our technical write-up on disabling the Management Engine on Purism laptops.

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