Hacker News Reader

And maybe just maybe when the Snowden revelations started to come out some people woke up and realised that the companies who design the processors used in the vast majority of computers are from the US.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...

View on HN

Since Applied Cryptograhy and everyday since publication it's been well-known and well-understood that NSA's never-ending efforts to weaken systems to make it easier for them to do their work wrecks havoc and costs billions to everyone else. Luckily their attempt to get everyone to adopt a PRNG that was broken on-purpose was thwarted.

But who's to say that any chipmaker gets bribed to backdoor their design to allow the reading of any page of RAM from any protection level doesn't happen? It would make their job super easy.

Some people might say “don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence” but introducing bugs via bribing an insider or even getting one of your people a job at Intel or AMD would be a very clever way to give yourself the keys to (nearly) all the castles.

Just don’t forget to patch the microcode on your own systems.

It wreaks havoc. I think wrecking havoc is probably the opposite to what you meant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com