Modern ASICs are so complex that I'm sure that sneaking a tiny backdoor into the behemoth that's a modern CPU or embedded SoC would be almost trivial. They'd also have great plausible deniability in case they're found, if something like SPECTRE was an intentional backdoor how would you ever prove it for instance?
I suspect putting in a backdoor would be difficult because they are complex. Wouldn’t it be far too easy for the backdoor to inadvertently cause reliability or performance issues? And the bug would have to be useful enough to warrant potentially destroying the semiconductor business of a nation, not just some difficult to trigger side channel.
It wasn’t wild nor uneducated; I have some experience with FPGAs and the challenges of complex circuit design - regardless, I was posing a question rather than stating fact.
Do you disagree with what I suggested? Educate me, correct my speculation.
That’s a fairly strong statement.
It could be argued it is conceivable as evidenced by the fact we are here talking about it.
Also, I’ve read that it’s impossible for any one person to fully comprehend the circuit diagram of a modern CPU. In light of that it seems conceviable any number of wayward circuits could be hidden.
There are at least two problems with China messing with CPUs: a) they are not made there. TSMC is Taiwan, the Asian parts of Global Foundries are in Singapore, Intel is manufacturing CPUs mostly in the USA with some in Ireland and Israel, only 3DNAND / 3DXPoint ICs are made in China. b) the hardware knowledge to change here, well, think of it, the microcontroller on the motherboard is on the few millimetres scale, the parts here are on the few ten nanometres scale so as a rough but not unjust quantifications would say it's 100 000 times harder.
Whether the platforms are hackable / hacked, that's harder to say thanks Intel ME and such but the CPUs aren't.