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by SV_BubbleTime 457 days ago
Is it?

A CCP subsidized chip is massively popular for its low cost in the US.

Ok if you feel this is not a backdoor, but the issue is this is not proof. There will never be proof.

There has long been suspicion. How is it crazy that undisclosed “features” are getting attention?

2 comments

> Ok if you feel this is not a backdoor, but the issue is this is not proof. There will never be proof.

When it's a special type of command that's only accessible from the host CPU, I have a hard time seeing any way to call it a backdoor. If it were some weird special input to a common command that could hypothetically be handed untrusted input that'd be a different matter, but in this case it's not going to be getting triggered unless the software running on the host CPU is intentionally trying to activate it.

Could these commands be hypothetically used by a malicious actor who had already managed to compromise the code running on the main CPU? Sure. Is there any reason to believe they're put there specifically to allow some kind of exploitability instead of just being debugging commands? Not a bit.

There's proof that this isn't a backdoor. There isn't proof that there isn't a backdoor, but that's a wildly different claim then "we found a backdoor".
You do not have proof this is not a backdoor. The word proof is being taken too lightly. You don’t get proof in hardware - you get promises.

And the people making them here have been found to break them. The CCP not necessarily Espresif.