The Die Is Cast: Hardware Security Is Not Assured

Re:The Die Is Cast: Hardware Security Is Not Assured by GeorgeTirebiter on Friday November 06, 2020 @06:15PM (#25012038)

Let me ask a question: it is possible? I think it is. Has the NSA / CIA / some other TLA done this? If it's possible, and it's useful for their 'mission' -- hard for me to believe they have NOT done this, or something like it. Paranoid? maybe; but I've seen too much, heard too much.

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Re:The Die Is Cast: Hardware Security Is Not Assured by alasdair_ on Friday November 06, 2020 @06:35PM (#25012138)

From random articles I once read (i.e. hardly authoritative) the US TLAs focused heavily on intercepting packages in transit, modifying them, then forwarding them on rather than rooting the entire production line. But obviously that's just the stuff that was publicized.

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Re:The Die Is Cast: Hardware Security Is Not Assured by henryfjordan on Friday November 06, 2020 @07:16PM (#25012324)

For a secret chip in a server to be useful, it needs to emit a signal, send data over the network, or be manually retrieved. If that were happening at any scale, someone would notice (especially in a data center).

If secret chips were going to be used, they'd be very targeted in nature (like a fake Comcast modem that they give to a specific target) rather than something general.

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Re:The Die Is Cast: Hardware Security Is Not Assured by rmrfstar on Friday November 06, 2020 @07:32PM (#25012391)

I wouldn't be so confident. If you have something running in the BMC, you can do literally anything.

In this case "anything" might mean transmitting a single bit of information that "this is an interesting box, come take a look".

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