But it needs to be stressed that these kind of things are not the magic fix for mobile phone comms that people think they are.
A lot of use cases in our current world involve state owned telecom entities and Joe-Arab-Spring-Six-Pack should not be confused into thinking this solves that problem.
Handset makers and carriers all have strong financial incentives to harden the basebands against hacks because they don't want people unlocking their phones, which was often being done by exploiting bugs in basebands. Also, they need the airwaves to have integrity and mobile protocols are all based on the assumption of trusted endpoints that don't violate the rules. Now that DIY GSM base stations have become a reality, carriers face a nightmare scenario of someone running a buggy or malicoius "tower" that infects basebands of any phones that enters into range and starts them doing some kind of horrible attack against the carrier infrastructure. E.g. you can imagine an extortion attempt that works this way. It's in their best interests for their devices to behave predictably and be controlled only be themselves.
I haven't heard of any process hardening going on though. Do you have a source for that? I want to learn more about it.
what reason could you possibly have to suspect that the IOMMUs from a company named "intel" are backdoored? :)
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/05/following-whi...
Why this isn't just a nit is, if you believe (say) VT-d is backdoored, a lack of IVT research projects isn't evidence of the absence of backdoors. Presumably, if the NSA is serious enough to backdoor Intel chipsets, they'll do it in a manner that a couple of independent security researchers can't black-box.