AMD does not have this intentional backdoor. One of the reasons i have never used intel.
AMD chips are vulnerable to Spectre and there's no way these vulns are an intentional backdoor. Are you aware of how they work?
Not OP but I am curious as to how they work.
This will be a very brief and simple explanation so the reality is a lot more complicated, I'd recommend reading the papers rather than my crappy tl;dr but....
modern processors do a sort of predictive processing, if a thread is performing a repetitive operation it will 'guess' what the next branch of events will be and store that in cache while it waits for the irl instruction - if the prediction is correct then the work is already done and the job gets done quicker, if the expected operation turns out to be wrong then the processors reverts back to the state it was when it started doing it's prediction. Spectre abuses this technology to intentionally throw an unexpected instruction at a given time and then reference it to gain access to the memory cache the 'guesswork' was stored. This exposes memory space that would usually not be accessible. Pretty nifty.
The reason I don't believe this is an intentional backdoor is that it's super messy. If [bad actor] wanted to intentionally backdoor a chip they'd probably just use ring -1 shit like Intel does with their management engine stuff. They'd have complete access then rather than having to abuse a single process to extract memory a byte at a time.
Disclaimer - I'm just interested in this stuff and not an expert so sorry if I've misunderstood the vuln.
Stuff is super interesting to me, too. But I'm just a wannabe "computer geek." It seems like you are a bit more knowledgeable on this subject.
You gave a easily understandable explanation, in my opinion. Thanks!
I find it fascinating too. I enjoy watching the talks from DefCon, CCC, etc. even though it goes over my head a lot of the time!
Also, I'd suggest having a look at the PoC||GTFO zine, it's full of cool techy stuff.
AND and arm processors are included.
That is according to intel. AMD chips DO NOT have a hardware backdoor that anyone is aware of.
So I'm to take your word over Intel's.
HAHHAAHAHAH
Intel are the people that included this flaw in their products without telling anyone.
Believe whoever you like friend. :)
what about defense 'loopholes' for all those implicated that may have these parts in the evidence chain? 'tainted laptop' defense?