3 ms·
They don't try particularly hard to cover that up. It's well-enough known that RDRAND is highly likely to be NSA-backdoored. They could always just shove NSA st
by PeCaN 10y ago
They don't try particularly hard to cover that up. It's well-enough known that RDRAND is highly likely to be NSA-backdoored. They could always just shove NSA stuff into the ME anyway (currently there's no reason to believe that they do this, however).
- nn3 10y agoI find it highly unlikely just based on basic economics. Imagine the potential conversation between Intel and the NSA: NSA: Please backdoor your RNG for us. Intel: We're making xx billions of this chip. What happens if someone finds out and we have to recall the chip. Are you paying us the xx billions back then? NSA: ... It is fairly unlikely the NSA could afford Intel.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoYou should look at the Snowden leaks sometime. They had cooperation, including backdoors, in a large number of companies' products and networks. RSA cost them about $30 mil to risk whole market. For carriers, usually around $100 mil or so. Also, remember that it's easier to do if you disguise it as a coding flaw. It wasn't a backdoor: just one among many flaws accidentally hitting our systems. Wouldn't cost any market share.
- CyberDildonics 10y agoI think it would be something more like: NSA: Please backdoor all sorts of stuf Intel: ok Security Researcher: these chips have backdoors Intel: Maybe they do, what are you going to do about it?
- PeCaN 10y agoIntel has plausible deniability. A backdoor in RDRAND would be some very minor statistical flaw. It could just be something tiny that makes private keys susceptible to some known or unknown attack.
- johnflan 10y agoI don't think he is asking about backdoored functions, but more about specific compute features requested for extremely specific workloads in their datacentres.