China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP

Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by mieseratte on Monday July 09, 2018 @10:16AM (#17490306)

> The mass surveillance was a result of the wide sweeping Patriot Act after 9/11.

As if the three-letter agencies never tried to cripple encryption before September 11th, 2001...

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Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by SEJeff on Monday July 09, 2018 @11:01AM (#17490663)

But it got demonstrably worse afterwards. It went from a quiet thing to a well funded effort, all in the name of "defending 'merica from terrorism". GW Bush and his admin enacted the law which Obama just made worse.

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Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by b4eEX on Monday July 09, 2018 @11:13AM (#17490799)

While I personally wasn't around in the 90's, I believe we're yet to see anything on the level of the Clipper chip and nineties' crypto wars in general in the 21st century. Or maybe they've learned to hide their activities better, but that's a bit of a Russell's teapot.

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Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by nickpsecurity on Monday July 09, 2018 @12:18PM (#17491331)

In the Snowden leaks, BULLRUN said they were secretly weakening every cryptosystem they could even in standards. The Core Secrets leak also said the FBI was "compelling" U.S. companies to "SIGINT-enable" their systems in secret. The groups doing this also operate secretly with effective, criminal immunity. Such a situation is way worse than them pushing an obviously-backdoored chip that we could've all spotted and worked around.

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Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by monocasa on Monday July 09, 2018 @11:36AM (#17490999)

Their diffie hellman hack, and router 0 days are everything they wanted out of the clipper chip.

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Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by marnett on Monday July 09, 2018 @12:49PM (#17491571)

What diffie-hellman hack are you referring to? I'm curious.

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Re:China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP by monocasa on Monday July 09, 2018 @01:11PM (#17491750)

https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html

https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf

Basically, for about $100M per prime (probs cheaper now), you can pre compute a big table that you can use to decrypt the diffie hellman exchange. From there you have the negotiated private keys, and you're off to the races for a full, real time decrypt. Since before the Snowden leaks, there wasn't the public thought that the choice of primes for diffie hellman mattered really for it's security, most implementations hardcoded the prime. Something like 92% of the top 1 million https sites were using the same 2 primes, and similar numbers of VPN and SSH implementations were vulnerable too.

So for a one time cost of ~$200m the NSA was able to decrypt the vast majority of internet traffic as long as they caught the diffie hellman exchange at the beginning.

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