Backdoors in your processor?

Posted by Ken Y-N on March 25th, 2009 at 03:46pm

Joanna from the Invisible Things posted a thought-provoking post on trusting processors and other hardware.

The thrust of the argument is that the more paranoid person is always sure to run open source software on their computer to ensure that there is little or no chance of backdoors being inserted into the code, but almost all computers have hardware with closed-source firmware, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are backdoors inserted into them, yet one never hears of demands for open-sourced microcode, even though a backdoor is far easier to hide there rather than in software. As she says:

If we don’t trust Microsoft, why should we trust Intel or AMD?

To relate to the Trusted Computing Group, all three companies mentioned above are members and heavily involved in the designs, but shouldn’t it be the TPM chip manufacturers that people focus on?

Tags: backdoor, invisible things

Under General Tags: backdoor, invisible things