I can't remove from my head the thought that the NSA has been exploiting that for years.
Conclusion: We need 100% open-source hardware ASAP if we're to become a sane society.
Edit: Anyone remember the "Intel inside" trademark [0] which was supposed to add (marketing) value to any PC which was allowed to carry that label? Well, today it's clear that this label actually stands for "Intelligence community inside".
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/trademarks/intel-ins...
There are several possible answers to that question:
1) "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."
2) Because the risk of getting this backdoor known would not be worth the cost.
3) Because Snowden's laptop was used with airgap.
4) Because at that point, the cat was already out of the bag (the journalists had the data on SDs).
My personal belief is that this is a little optimistic. There's a lot wrong with our society, and intel embedding Minix in the ME doesn't really rise to the top of current issues.
I would really like an option that did not have binary blobs in the bios or CPU. That's tough, though...CPU's always have microcode fixes, don't they?
So far, I think the best option for this kind of thing is the Raptor workstation with the Power7 CPU.
> My personal belief is that this is a little optimistic. There's a lot wrong with our society, and intel embedding Minix in the ME doesn't really rise to the top of current issues.
It's not optimistic. Society will change massively - in the good direction. We have still a lot of work ahead of us, and there will of course be pain along the way, but the Planet will become peaceful and clean again. And we are assisted in this process. How do I know? I've seen it.
I'm also not an SJW or whatever. I'm just saying that things that can be very important to us...that we think will have a tremendous impact on the future...those things aren't universal issues. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of where you are coming from to see how this would be a major component of getting to a peaceful and clean world. If so, I would like to hear more. Thanks.
With every new player (government, company, user) joining the open-source approach, we get additional eyes on the code/hardware.
Imagine all world governments using only open-source code/hardware: Given the current budgets at play, we would have 100% secure code/hardware in a matter of seconds - for everybody on the Planet.
Why is this not happening? Because governments (currently) still do not fully represent the citizens' interests. They mainly represent their interests first (which is the protection and expansion of their power monopoly). This is called the principal-agent problem.
Let's suppose that I have a 3D printer sophisticated enough to print open-source circuitboards. How do I trust my 3d printer?
I think there's a hardware "trusting trust" problem; I can't imagine how your optimism could ever be realized. I hope I'm missing something!
Your futuristic 3D printer could be backdoored to recognize certain patterns and modify them sneakily but that would be pretty sophisticated and somebody validating thoroughly the output could detect the unexpected divergence. Designing a generic backdoor that would work on any CPU design without being obvious sounds very tricky indeed.
It would also be very difficult to hide the code generating the backdoor if the software of the printer is open source itself. Then you'd have to insert inconspicuous code in the printer's driver which would have the very complex task of messing with the model to insert a backdoor in an arbitrary user-controlled design.
100% secure? You must be joking. Since there is no code without bugs and certain percentage of bugs have security implications there is no 100% secure.
1. https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/09/15-sh...
Automated fuzzing is a solution amongst others.