Does anyone honestly buy into the idea that this is something other than a back door, carefully plotted by certain nation-state actors?
For real.
For real.
The reason these flaws were found in the first place were because of security researchers, hopefully they can now make their cases to get large research grants and bring about a more secure future.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about tin-foil hat "CPUs working against users", only look so far as Intel ME and the equivalents on other processors. Closed-source and highly privileged code running all the time inside the CPU - it's not unthinkable that Intel would bend the knee to some state actors, especially if that leads to higher profits (i.e. a tax break or entry into a new market (cough China)). It's enough of a concern that a lot of reverse engineering effort has gone into preventing it from running.
They have tons of testing already. The problem is that this is the kind of problem which is easy to miss with tests, especially automated ones, because everything worked correctly and no real code would ever have been affected by the side effects.
Hopefully this will lead to better automated testing procedures for Intel, other processor manufacturers and security researchers.
The emphasis on "better" as there is obviously automated testing in existence already.
Following the money suggests Intel was chasing an enterprise market and didn’t bother to think through the consequences (unlikely) or made a car-manufacturing style decision where the costs of failure were deemed to be overshadowed by the profits on their balance sheets.
For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold Pinto cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death. It had a better design but it would have cost production delays to implement it. Less money to have people die than fix the issue when it was noticed in testing.
While I’m not equating Intel’s actions to Ford’s in direct comparison, I would say the bean counter thought process is far more likely than conspiracy.
Suppose they did this. Now, that the vulnerabilities are public, Intel takes the fall. Oopsie, huh?