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  saidnooneever
  this is pretty old by now but still very relevant. people dont look at this enough but with rising chip complexities for TPU units etc. and a shift towards poorly documented hardware like NVIDIA gives this problem new fuel.Domas (and maybe his team or colleagues?) has put out shit tons of very interesting materials over the past years on advanced malware, implants and things like Cantor Dust which are amazing things to dive into.using his own cpu fuzzer, msr fuzzing techniques etc. he has found, reversed and implemented attacks through hardware bugs and backdoors.It cant be confirmed if a backdoor is malicious or for debugging but essentially the capabilities gained through them are what is important.These techniques he shows throughout his videos are not super tricky to replicate and I can recommend people who have interest to dive into it, reproduce things and try to help in this domain to raise awareness and findings.Another good avenu is: Defcon 21 - Decapping Chips The Strike Easy Hard WayPeople speak about supply chain issues in NPM and Pip etc. but these are much more severe and hard to detect.Almost no one looks at it. Most vendors totally ignore it because you cannot sell products against it. (if ud detect it u need to trash the hw so its not handy... for sales...)
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  joss82
  This backdoor only appears on decades-old VIA C3 embedded x86 processors
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  blueflow
  As noted by userbinator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220030Not a backdoor, but a documented CPU feature.The whitepaper about rosenbridge cannot be published because it would constitute scientific fraud.
• rzzzt
  You can find recorded presentations on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_eSAF_qT_FY
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  sfdlkj3jk342a
  So is it apparent that this backdoor was intentionally added by VIA for nefarious purposes? Or is there any other reasonable explanation for its existence?
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  codedokode
  This shows that large companies making closed-source CPUs cannot be trusted. No doubt they would add whatever the government asks them to add.What can be done to mitigate this? One option would be to buy a large FPGA and flash it with an open-source CPU. Another would be to emulate a CPU, working with encrypted data and commands, so that even if the backdoor in a host CPU tries to overwrite memory, it would only crash the emulated OS. One more option would be to run the code in a Virtual Machine like QEMU which translates the code and prevents issuing unknown instructions.
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  bassiee
  For Intel-ME and AMD PSP, you fundamentally can't see the backdoor they could produce unless you probe the seperate chip lol.
• zx8080
  Title should be: ..in VIA C3 processors.
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  sph
  Should add (2018) to the title
• rbanffy
  It’s lovely to think some x86 CPUs have a nice ISA buried under the layers of cruft that form a recent x86 ISA.I still remember the time when mnemonics were 2 or 3 characters. Good days.
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  ironbound
  Click bait title, please change it to VIA C3 CPUs
• userbinator
  "Not this shit again"...Almost exactly 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17727140
• inigyou
  While the README calls it a separate core, it's more likely to be a direct encoding of uops.
• StrLght
  (2018)
• anon
  undefined
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  WhereIsTheTruth
  Interesting codenames: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_VIA_C3_microprocessors
• IshKebab
  Can we add "some ancient Via CPUs" to the title. Current title is pure click bait.
• DobarDabar
  [dead]
• jkwang
  [flagged]
• greenyhuman
  [dead]
• benfortaz
  [dead]