Remember, you don't have to be unhackable, just sufficiently unimportant to not be worth burning any novel capability on
so unless you're worth all that trouble, you're really just trying to avoid being "low hanging fruit" compromised by some batch script probing known (and usually very old) vulnerabilities
or they just pay the $2100 per API call to download it from the telco or social media company.
it's not improper if you agreed to give a company the ability to sell your data to anyone -- the government is anyone, and they have the money.
Alas, no matter how hard we try to trust our compilers, we must also adopt methods to trust our foundries.
Oh, we don't have our own foundries?
Yeah, thats the real problem. Who owns the foundries?
While having your own foundry is undoubtedly a good thing from the perspective of supply chain resiliency, if hacking is what you're worried about there are probably easier ways to mitigate (e.g. a bit more rigor in QC).
There's a reason the NSA can get Intel CPUs without IME and you can't. Given the incentives and competence of the people involved, it's probably an intentional vulnerability that you can't escape because you don't fab your own chips. There's strong circumstantial evidence that Huawei got banned from selling their products in the US for doing the same thing. And the Crypto AG backdoor (in hardware but probably not in silicon) was probably central to a lot of 20th-century international relations, though that wasn't publicly known until much later.
And this is before we get into penny-ante malicious hardware like laser printer toner cartridges, carrier-locked cellphones, and HDMI copy protection.
No amount of QC is going to remove malicious hardware; at best, it can tell you it's there.
This is also a completely different threat model but whatever.
A small country that imports these chips and wanted to protect its national security by providing "me disabled" chips wouldnt need a whole foundry of its own to turn it off or to verify that there isnt a "hidden" ME. The cost of this would probably run into low millions not billions.
It might not be an intentional backdoor, but it very much seems designed with out-of-band access in mind, with the AMT remote management features and the fact that the network controller has DMA (this enables packet interception).
>Otherwise you're just going to be making stupid mistakes that real cryptographers and security folks found and wrote defenses against three decades ago.
Yeah, thats the point, learn those same techniques, get it in the guild, and watch each others backs.
Rather than just 'trusting' some faceless war profiteers from the midst of an out of control military-industrial complex.
When you start successfully reaching many people you can be sure that security agencies will start watching you.
If you vocally oppose your tyrannical government, you won't avoid a bomb on your head. In the best case you'll get a bullet through your head. Worst case, you spend a lifetime in a prison.
"It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does."
If relevant adversaries don't know which computer to burn the exploit on, then they won't burn it on the right one.