Re:Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in mothe...
by kickopotomus on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @06:50PM
(#18660115)
The distinction there is the type of device. Caps are not used on data lines. The parent comment is talking particularly about how the Bloomberg article kept referencing the attack vector as a disguised cap.
The comment that you are referring to used a 2-pin device in place of the pull-up resistor on the SDA line of an I2C bus. That does seem fascinating and I would like to read more about it but I still have a lot of reservations about real-world applications.
Re:Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in mothe...
by shard on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @10:46PM
(#18661232)
Caps can be used on data lines to filter out high frequency noise, as it forms an RC lowpass filter with the source impedence (see here for an example: https://jretest.com/understanding-data-signals/ ), although I do not know enough about motherboard design to know whether these caps are needed on any of the data lines.
Your instincts seem to have deceived you. There's a top-level comment with a variety of replies that discusses a 2-pin device to snoop or modify data to an I2C device, and plenty of other literature documenting the feasibility of such devices.