How do you not feel embarrassed after typing that edit. The iPhone flair also gives it a special kind of irony. The timing of me finding this post 5 years later right when there’s a discovery of the NSA backdoor in Apple A12-A16 chips is impeccable.
How do you not feel embarrassed after typing that edit. The iPhone flair also gives it a special kind of irony. The timing of me finding this post 5 years later right when there’s a discovery of the NSA backdoor in Apple A12-A16 chips is impeccable.
I doubt ARM’s designs have backdoors in them, too many people can look at them. It is better to just put the backdoors in a level lower, especially because those companies, Qualcomm and Apple are American but ARM isn’t.
I agree. Every Chinese chip maker will look at those design and revise them.
While it doesn’t matter if arm®’s designs have these specific bits in them because no one is using a basic straight off the rack arm chip, two other possibilities are that the backdoor was a debugging tool or added in by a contractor that’s a security cutout. Both are very possible.
Being able to input your secret code and bypass that pesky mmu would help in low level debugging and if you were a spook wanting to get your shit in a chip it’s a lot easier to hire the person contracted to design the chunks of silicon that get licensed than to actually get an agreement going with the company that’s putting it all together.