[ExI] Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Sun Jul 14 14:11:01 UTC 2013


On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Andrew Mckee  wrote:
<snip>
> Yeeeh, kinda a small problem with that advice if Intel are indeed
> cooperating with spy agencies to enable backdoor access to PCs.
> Since there would likely be no BIOS options for it would there?
>
> But even if there was, it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference, since by
> being included on die the VNC /AMT software can operate at a level even
> below the PCs  bootstrap and BIOS flash memory.
>
> Hardware is an interesting question, the Chinese spy agency manged to get
> network backdoorable chips into the routers Huawai has been selling to the
> world, the US government leaned on and received complete co-operation by
> some of the US's biggest  Internet, software and telecoms corporations to
> spy on internet users everywhere, are you really so confidant that they left
> networking infrastructure companies off that list.
>

Well, as you know it is almost impossible to prove a negative.

Let's just say that no known, provable backdoors have been
demonstrated. Outside of known features, like vPro.

And there are other processors on the market besides Intel. If
security was a USP (unique selling point) then companies would be
shouting about it. Conspiracy theory demands that *all* processors
would have NSA backdoors built in.

And people are using and testing these chips continuously. Surely some
researcher, somewhere, would spot an unusual response, or strange
network packets flowing around?

Even on your own laptop you can monitor processes and traffic to see
what is going on. Not just panic every time a background disk defrag
starts up, or your antivirus software does an automatic update without
asking permission.

I'm happy nothing funny is going on with my pc (not a vPro Intel i5 or
i7 processor). But I'm watching!  :)

BillK



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