Researchers built devious, undetectable hardware-level backdoor in computer chips

Oh goody, just what we need, more devious and undetectable surveillance in the form of an “invisible” backdoor built into computer chip hardware. I’m completely creeped out after reading “A2: Analog Malicious Hardware” (pdf), which won as “best paper” at the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

University of Michigan Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science researchers didn’t just dream up this undetectable hardware-level backdoor; they built it.

The researchers don’t call it “surveillance,” but we’ll get back to that. A2 is a “new style of fabrication-time attack” which leverages “analog circuits to create a hardware attack” that is “small, stealthy, and controllable.” The “remotely-controllable privilege escalation” attack would be nearly impossible to detect.

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