On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 08:36:17PM +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > (2) Since the NSA has preferential access to all sorts of vulnerabilities > (if not outright backdoors) in IT equipment exported by American > companies, it stands to reason that they are scared shitless of the > reverse scenario.
In fact Chinese hardware could be banned just because of theoretic future security risk. That's not to mention the fact that it may be banned because the US backdoors can't be planted any more - workstations for security-concious environments cost quite a lot, and banning some company from this market would make a good point in negotiating such delicate matters. > (3) There is an ever-increasing amount of code running outside the > control of the operating system. Have you looked at the remote > management options of a plain office PC lately? CPU microcode > updates from the BIOS? And what *does* all that SMM code do? It's > all completely trustworthy and bug free, I'm sure. FWIW the network cards' firmware would serve a better place for backdoor - they interfere with network and do some cryptography the OS relies upon. -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
