I realize I'm a bit late on the reply, but a few thoughts: - CRC would easily encounter a collision within the first few minutes (at the most) of running any a

I realize I'm a bit late on the reply, but a few thoughts: - CRC would easily encounter a collision within the first few minutes (at the most) of running any arbitrary code (your operating system, for instance). You'd need something much longer and less prone to errors, like SHA. Otherwise you'd be getting lots of weird problems as the CPU triggers the backdoor constantly. - More complex hashing would take more memory and lots of CPU time, something that would doubtfully be available to at the microcode level. If every instruction computed a non-trivial hash, someone would quickly notice performance issues ;) - Shorting the RNG would produce some very suspicious results, and anyone looking at any kind of fuzzed tests, testing encryption strength, or running tests against something like OpenSSL would quickly discover the backdoor. - Any kind of "the next comparison is always true" would easily trip even the most basic of unit tests, and it would happen every time. Making it only happen randomly might help, but would likely still be found relatively quickly.