"One of Silicon Valley's most respected technology experts, Steve Blank, says he would be 'surprised' if the US National Security Agency [NSA] was not embedding 'back doors' inside chips produced by Intel and AMD

http://www.afr.com/p/technology/intel_chips_could_be_nsa_key_to_ymrhS1HS1633gCWKt5tFtI

fuck

"Indeed. From what I know how processors work, all they do is math operations on bits, which are zeroes and ones. It's "multiply/add/divide this number with this number", and it does this trillions of times per second. The program that is giving the CPU the instructions could be decrypting an Al-Qaeda messsage, or decoding a picture of Mila Kunis. And with multi-tasking, it would be decoding that picture, and a millisecond later, it would be decoding a bit of MP3 that another program is playing through the speakers.
If you want to log everything, the CPU would have to record all these operations somewhere. It can't just write to the disk, it has to know which parts of the disk is free and which parts are occupied, depending on the filesystem used by the operating system, data on disk is arranged differently. So you'd have to have filesystem drivers for most-used operating systems. Even then, it would have to communicate with the OS that is actually running to prevent collisions -- the CPU would have to know that the filesystem driver is actually talking to it and manipulate it to prevent said collisions. But how would it know that? It can't tell if the 1s and 0s are Mila Kunis' eyes or the filesystem driver checking the map of disk allocation...
The CPU might theoretically be able to send the data over the network, but again it would have to have the network card driver to be able to talk to it. It would have to know the system's current IP address and route to the remote computer. Virtually impossible to do without talking to the operating system."

ammy wrote:"Indeed. From what I know how processors work, all they do is math operations on bits, which are zeroes and ones. It's "multiply/add/divide this number with this number", and it does this trillions of times per second. The program that is giving the CPU the instructions could be decrypting an Al-Qaeda messsage, or decoding a picture of Mila Kunis. And with multi-tasking, it would be decoding that picture, and a millisecond later, it would be decoding a bit of MP3 that another program is playing through the speakers.
If you want to log everything, the CPU would have to record all these operations somewhere. It can't just write to the disk, it has to know which parts of the disk is free and which parts are occupied, depending on the filesystem used by the operating system, data on disk is arranged differently. So you'd have to have filesystem drivers for most-used operating systems. Even then, it would have to communicate with the OS that is actually running to prevent collisions -- the CPU would have to know that the filesystem driver is actually talking to it and manipulate it to prevent said collisions. But how would it know that? It can't tell if the 1s and 0s are Mila Kunis' eyes or the filesystem driver checking the map of disk allocation...
The CPU might theoretically be able to send the data over the network, but again it would have to have the network card driver to be able to talk to it. It would have to know the system's current IP address and route to the remote computer. Virtually impossible to do without talking to the operating system."

This needs to be upvoted for visibility. You're very correct.
My work involves a lot of high-performance computing. I write, debug and run a lot of code on supercomputers (BlueGene/Q and L for now but the L is being retired). Some people I know work on the BlueGene/P at the Argonne National Labs. There are several degrees of separation between the compute nodes (CPUs) and the network itself. The same separations exist in anyone's home computer too (and perhaps more so because of the consumer grade OS). Frankly a direct CPU backdoor is one of the stupidest things one can conceive for surveillance purposes. There are simply too many "closed" layers standing between NSA and that backdoor that it just defeats the purpose.
If there is a backdoor anywhere in consumer grade computers, the first place I would look would be the BIOS. It's been demonstrated at the 2006 Black Hat conference that it's possible to gain elevated privileges and read the contents of the physical memory through a BIOS attack. Ultimately it's a mini-OS in itself - there's hardware access system-wide. It's pretty reasonable to think that a supremely useful backdoor could be built into motherboard chipsets with manufacturer cooperation.

ammy wrote:

ammy wrote:"Indeed. From what I know how processors work, all they do is math operations on bits, which are zeroes and ones. It's "multiply/add/divide this number with this number", and it does this trillions of times per second. The program that is giving the CPU the instructions could be decrypting an Al-Qaeda messsage, or decoding a picture of Mila Kunis. And with multi-tasking, it would be decoding that picture, and a millisecond later, it would be decoding a bit of MP3 that another program is playing through the speakers.
If you want to log everything, the CPU would have to record all these operations somewhere. It can't just write to the disk, it has to know which parts of the disk is free and which parts are occupied, depending on the filesystem used by the operating system, data on disk is arranged differently. So you'd have to have filesystem drivers for most-used operating systems. Even then, it would have to communicate with the OS that is actually running to prevent collisions -- the CPU would have to know that the filesystem driver is actually talking to it and manipulate it to prevent said collisions. But how would it know that? It can't tell if the 1s and 0s are Mila Kunis' eyes or the filesystem driver checking the map of disk allocation...
The CPU might theoretically be able to send the data over the network, but again it would have to have the network card driver to be able to talk to it. It would have to know the system's current IP address and route to the remote computer. Virtually impossible to do without talking to the operating system."

This needs to be upvoted for visibility. You're very correct.
My work involves a lot of high-performance computing. I write, debug and run a lot of code on supercomputers (BlueGene/Q and L for now but the L is being retired). Some people I know work on the BlueGene/P at the Argonne National Labs. There are several degrees of separation between the compute nodes (CPUs) and the network itself. The same separations exist in anyone's home computer too (and perhaps more so because of the consumer grade OS). Frankly a direct CPU backdoor is one of the stupidest things one can conceive for surveillance purposes. There are simply too many "closed" layers standing between NSA and that backdoor that it just defeats the purpose.
If there is a backdoor anywhere in consumer grade computers, the first place I would look would be the BIOS. It's been demonstrated at the 2006 Black Hat conference that it's possible to gain elevated privileges and read the contents of the physical memory through a BIOS attack. Ultimately it's a mini-OS in itself - there's hardware access system-wide. It's pretty reasonable to think that a supremely useful backdoor could be built into motherboard chipsets with manufacturer cooperation.

tl;dr the guy in the article is a retard

putting a backdoor in a processor is retarded when you could put it in the os

ozzie freedom wrote:putting a backdoor in a processor is retarded when you could put it in the os

ya thats what they were talking about where i got that quote from

windows no doubt has a buttfuckload of backdoors from all kinds of alphabet soup agencies but they probably want to spy on the lunix and BSD users too

ammy wrote:

ozzie freedom wrote:putting a backdoor in a processor is retarded when you could put it in the os

ya thats what they were talking about where i got that quote from

windows no doubt has a buttfuckload of backdoors from all kinds of alphabet soup agencies but they probably want to spy on the lunix and BSD users too

i dont know if im safe or not

ammy wrote:

ammy wrote:

ozzie freedom wrote:putting a backdoor in a processor is retarded when you could put it in the os

ya thats what they were talking about where i got that quote from

windows no doubt has a buttfuckload of backdoors from all kinds of alphabet soup agencies but they probably want to spy on the lunix and BSD users too

i dont know if im safe or not

well my BIOS has bigass lenovo logo and lenovo is chinese and china doesnt like to co-operate with the US at all so i think that's clean

if anything im being monitored by the glorious chinese government, praise mao