3 ms·

How would such a thing work?

• ancarda 13y ago
  My guess is it's a rigged random number generator. When the OS calls RdRand to get a seed value, it could be predictable by the NSA in some way. That allows them to more easily break crypto done on the machine.
  • dobbsbob 13y ago
    This is what I was thinking too, but it would also render the entire US infrastructure insecure and I don't see that happening, unless gov agencies and contractors buy a special non crippled CPU and that would raise red flags/whistleblowers eventually. FBI likes to force backdoors but I think the NSA realizes it could be turned against them if purposely sabotaging their own country..... unless just the exports have been backdoored /tinfoil Then again NIST did once recommend a feeble RNG presumably so the NSA could break it with a RN skeleton key This is probably BS but hopefully additional fear mongering promotes more open hardware projects. If you want to see terrifying insecurity reverse engineer any mobile baseband stack and processor its running in supervisor mode and everything is executable w/no NX bit
• AsymetricCom 13y ago
  SMM and closed source hardware drivers means that it can happen from anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised but I would be surprised that nobody has bothered doing deep inspection of network packets or Microsoft binaries since the time when Microsoft doing an update without asking a user was considered a big deal... Now nobody cares about that. http://inertiawar.com/microcode/ http://inertiawar.com/microcode/