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It is public knowledge that US intelligence agencies actually just hijack computers and equipment on their way to the customer and install hardware backdoors th
by scaramanga 6y ago
It is public knowledge that US intelligence agencies actually just hijack computers and equipment on their way to the customer and install hardware backdoors there (Snowden et al., 2014).
It is also known that they have had backdoors in commercial systems as they came off the shelf, but I think usually those were CIA owned and controlled companies like the crypto AG phones.
What is unknown (pure speculation) is whether, for example, Intel CPUs come backdoored straight from the factory floor? On the one hand, that would be a powerful capability to have, but on the other hand, the risk of exposure and subsequent damage to the US economy, prestige, etc. would be non-zero. So it's hard (for a plebian like me, anyway) to estimate how those costs/benefits might be weighed up by the US government.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago>What is unknown (pure speculation) is whether, for example, Intel CPUs come backdoored straight from the factory floor? There is also a third possibility, that some intelligence agency invested a ton of cash into finding abusable exploits in these systems giving them the same access a backdoor would provide. Also from the Snowden leaks, we know that they have programs with budgets in the millions into finding similar exploits and that there were similar programs outside Snowden's clearance. And though a bug may cause the same damage to the economy, it wouldn't hurt US prestige in the same way.
- jeffbee 6y agoBudgets in the millions, eh? So two full-time engineers?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoSorry, I misremembered the details. Around $400 million a year for the one program we have details on.
- rblatz 6y agoIf I'm the CIA I have dozens of highly placed agents or at least informants at Intel. Not necessarily placing backdoors, but finding and not fixing exploits and sending them back to the CIA for later use. It would be extremely cheap, hell if I'm China, Russia, the UK, or Israel I'm doing the same thing.
- monocasa 6y agoYou don't even Intel employees for that. State actors typically get source access for 'verfication' purposes. Russia and China would get Windows source access for instance.
- jesboat 6y ago> On the one hand, that would be a powerful capability to have, but on the other hand, the risk of exposure and subsequent damage to the US economy, prestige, etc. would be non-zero If I were a three-letter agency, I'd bribe/blackmail somebody into inserting intentionally vulnerable code. After all, sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. We've often seen that the code inside firmware, secure environments like trustzone, etc tend to lack many of the mitigations for the classic vulnerabilities. Just rewrite one of the ASN.1 parsers in the ME (I'm sure there's at least one), "forget" a bounds check in some particularly obscure bit, and you'd have a textbook stack smash.
- tinus_hn 6y agoSubtly change the RNG implementation so there’s a predictability only you know.
- trasz 6y agoThat’s one of the reasons why operating systems provide a proper CPRNG instead of trusting RDRAND.
- IncRnd 6y agoHow would an OS seed an RNG in the cloud? How would you seed an RNG on a headless server in a VM? What about when that VM is copied, possibly while running, in order to duplicate server functionality? There are vulnerabilities and threats here that your comment does not take into account.
- trasz 6y agoYou can use virtio_random. But really, it's not about operating systems not using RDRAND at all - it's fine to use it as one of the entropy sources; what you don't want to do is use RDRAND directly instead of CPRNG.
- trasz 6y agoYou don’t need to bribe anyone; Intel is a US company, so A TLA can just discretely explain to them how export restrictions work.