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Comment by plumeria | Hacker News Reader

Backdoor Inside™

This time it is their’s backdoor at least.

Intel AMT and AMD TrustZone were suspected as US intelligence backdoors for long time.

Countries like Russia prohibit use of foreign CPUs in any strategic and military application. I bet China doesn’t run Intel/AMD CPUs in government offices too.

It's the US who puts sanctions on companies working with foreign military organizations and manufacturers. So, they can't freely buy chips for rockets, for example. But their PCs use Intel chips and Microsoft Windows OS. Microsoft opens their source codes to security services of different nations, including Russia and China. There are of course Linux distributions which are supposed to be used by army, but no one really uses them.

Nobody who knows how AMT or TrustZone works thinks that they are a US intelligence backdoor.

China runs Intel/AMD CPUs in government and so does Russia.

You missed the part about "strategic and military use" for Russia, don't know well about chinese rules.

I don't understand your comment. Are you saying the US would never put a backdoor in a chip?

I think we need a Geneva convention on microelectronics and informatics products. We are growing tired of this spy bullshit by the so-called super powers.

They are destroying the information age. We need machines and software we can trust and who don't go around spilling our secrets.

>I think we need a Geneva convention on microelectronics and informatics products.

Such convention is not very useful when you can't detect and prove a violation.

Or you can just buy chips from companies who don't put backdoor in them.

Which would be? I suppose you could run opensparc - but you'd still have to trust the fab..

how can you tell?

Sadly useless if even the US doesn't sign & ratify such a thing. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_treaties_unsigned_or_u...

If you deploy systems for governments, you're security-conscious enough to realize threats can come from unexpected places, including hardware components, and will implement security measures to minimize these threats. Russia and China see Intel CPUs (and Western network equipment in general) the same way we perceive Dhyanas.

Depends which one you would prefer, one from USA, one from Israel or one from China?

Intel itself is backdoored with the ME firmware. The Chinese will probably have their own backdoors in place.

You mean like Intel ME?

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