[mattbauer]

I'm skeptical. There are too many unsupported claims in this article. Off the top of my head:

- Assumes the Chinese put the backdoor in. There are plenty of others interested in backdoors. - Assumes the designing company doesn't do any detailed production product checks. Not likely since this is a many, many billion dollar business. - Claims a systemic problem but only notes one chip. That one FPGA could just have a design flaw. Need more details on the others. - At the end it claims an investigation over ten years but the fab world has greatly changed over ten years. Many micro controller companies actually own their Chinese fabs now.

As a side note, if you discover something like this, don't assume you found something you weren't meant to find. You're discovery may just have made you found.

[tptacek]

Many (maybe most? I don't specialize here) backdoors are deniably accidental, a term I'm coining here to mean "could be sabotage, could be a development artifact".

Whether any of those backdoors are deliberate is much less relevant than whether they're known to your adversaries. In the case of Chinese electronics engineering, your adversaries have the blueprints.

Do you really think it's likely that designers of bespoke silicon reliably decap, image, and analyze the finished products? I think you're attributing Intel/AMD-level wherewithal when, just like in software, a huge chunk of the market has nothing resembling the resources of the leading vendors.