How do we know that governments don't just have a secret hardware backdoor in all our devices?

Every phone has a radio with remote root access controlled by a security key that is supposedly only in the hands of the manufacturer. A manufacturer that could be forced to give up that key, and forced not to tell anyone they had done so.

At least with a PC you can control the physical access to transmission, giving you a way to possibly audit before send, and physically control all input.

The reality is that any large scale communication network will be breached by the controlling government, or it will be shut down. If you want actually secure communication, you have to do it by broadcasting in the clear using an unbreakable cypher that's been physically passed on.

We don't.

We really really don't.

Consider the attack that Israel carried out this fall by detonating walkie-talkies and pagers. This wasn't just some illicit code in the firmware or hardware, they managed to hijack the supply chain and hide literal bombs in commercially-produced handheld devices!

Bottom line: If you do not directly control the production chain from chip design and fab to end-user software, you can never be sure.

40 years ago, the legendary Ken Thompsonand Dennis Ritchie accepted the Turing Award for creating Unix. Thompson's acceptance speech Reflections on Trusting Trust pointed out this same fundamental security flaw.

I encourage everyone to read the article, and spread it as widely as possible. It is terrifying and accurate, nearly half a century later.

Well, there is this time a few months ago where the Chinese government hacked AT&T and Verizon using the mandatory backdoors the US government left for wiretaps...

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b

That's the reason leaving backdoors is generally a really, really bad idea, because you don't know who else can use them

It's not just back doors. All governments will have a group of people who's job is to find security vulnerabilities in OS and use them to attack other nations.

If Wanacry rings a bell the you might be aware that the Eternal Blue exploit was the infection vector which was originally designed by the NSA and leaked by a hacking group. Only after the leak did the NSA tell Microsoft how it worked and it was patched.

We will never have a way of knowing for sure. There are stories of government agencies famously requesting backdoor access to Apple devices, seemingly because they can't get in otherwise, and Apple refusing, however they end up getting access on their own eventually. But who knows how much of that is even true? Government agencies are historically manipulative when it comes to public narrative, so anything made public by them should be taken with a hefty grain of salt

We know they do, actually.

All US companies provide the NSA with backdoors. All modern AMD and Intel CPUs have the ability to run remote code signed by their manufacturer and snoop into memory.

Put the two things together and now you know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor

If I was a government intelligence agency I'd probably sell my soul to get access to these...

I get that they have legitimate use cases for corporations, but why are there virtually no consumer grade CPUs without that stuff ? Surely they would be less expensive and no one would miss the features on their home computers.

Wasn't that something Asange or Snowden blew the whistle on? That the CIA or NSA or something actually has backdoors in pretty much everything, along with all kinds of spyware floating around the net?

We don't. The point is to reduce attack surface relative to target value. People use a VPN for piracy, for example, not because it's totally secure, but because rights holders generally aren't going to bother going after a single person when they'd have to go thru a VPN provider as well. OTOH someone doing it on clearnet is being logged by their ISP and the data is right there. OTOOH, the three letter agencies are absolutely going to bother if they have a tip that you're doing something really dangerous to the status quo.

TL;DR: It's like IRL security. If somebody really wants your shit, they'll find a way to get it. The point is to make it generally not worth it.

They do.

There's no way to check the whole thing, but you can totally pick a component and reverse engineer it, which is something people do quite a bit. When spying is found, it's usually a private company doing it.

The NSA doesn't care about your search history, but advertisers do. (and the government ever did, they'll just call up google)

Okay so here's my take on it not that anybody asked.

There are likely back doors in all computerized Networked devices.

There is likely some identifying information being sent back to random servers from a myriad of places.

That being said, you are not worth the time to directly observe.

Most likely, all of this data goes into a large database where they analyze trends and look for people that are outside of various tolerance zones.

Other than that, all of your data is just noise, grist for the grist Mill.

It is only when you become a person of interest who is worth devoting the time to directly analyze that these risks escalate to the point where you should have concern about it.

99.9999% of us are just not important enough to pay attention to.

I've worked for the government. They had me managing 78 full AWS accounts for various departments. Me, 1 guy. And I had to explain basics of tech to everybody in charge of the cloud accounts.

Our gov can barely manage itself, let alone some next level tech on millions of devices and keep track of it all. They couldn't even get me a new mouse without 2 forms, 1 online ticket, and 2 levels of approvals.

A few years ago they had rerouted shipments from Cisco to the NSA and then forward to the intended recipients. Not just a few parcels, but truckloads.

they do

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/146/

Didn't national treasure Edward Snowden prove this?

If the government wants to snoop, they can just get a Certificate Authority in the boat and MITM whoever they want.

In my region there are laws that telecoms have to provide a way to let the government snoop, but the government doesn't use it without probable cause.

Some people think a VPN will protect them, because the provider doesn't log, but all the government needs is the VPN keys and they can intercept all traffic between the VPN and the user and log it themselves.

This is probably going to be a very unpopular opinion but I am much angrier at a corporation having my data than a govermment and the former is much easier to avoid

Yeah, we don't. It's generally hard/impossible to prove the nonexistence of something. Similar as with God. It's unlikely, but we can't prove he doesn't exist with certainty. These proofs only work for very simple and contained systems.

It's difficult to know that for sure, which is why (e.g.) the US government wants to make sure that there is domestic chip manufacture with a completely controlled supply chain to make hardware for classified communications. It can help to consider the difference between targeted surveillance (spending millions to tap the President's phone, to get big juicy national secrets) and dragnet surveillance (tapping everybody's phone so that you can have dirt on Joe Schmoe if he does something interesting later, even if he is of no particular interest right now). Hardware backdoors would be used mostly for targeted surveillance.

Stuff like VPN's and encrypted apps can be of considerable help against dragnet surveillance, which is what the civil privacy community mostly cares about. If you think you might be a subject of targeted surveillance, you have to be much more paranoid. Not just hardware backdoors in your computer, but suspicious white vans on your street, microphones in your flower pots, FBI agents under your bed, the whole bit.

There are some countermeasures you can take against hardware backdoors (electromagnetically isolate a computer from the network and transfer data from it by floppy disc or similar) but basically you're in a different world if you're dealing with this.

You mght like the book "Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson (older editions free online and still very good: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/book.html and scroll down). It goes into this stuff, has lots of good overviews even if you gloss over the technical parts, and will generally help you see clearly in the topic.

‘They’ (I.e. government agencies/PPP) actively exploit weaknesses or institutionally create them. Personal favorite is the backdoors built into TETRA, which is used for mainly government purposes (law enforcement, emergency services). ETSI acts as a strawman for government interest and serves no cause other than that of its masters. That bugs me to no end because this does not serve any purpose.

https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/interview-with-the-etsi-standards/

“If you can’t trust the governments of the world, then who can you trust?”
Albert Einstein, Young Einstein

You have to operate as if they have back doors.

With that being said, shit positing is not a national security issue yet.

Although DHS chief glowie did provide comments recently on how online discourse is a serious threat to CEOs

So they are clearly monitoring all socials for these vibes.

The fact that they got full might of daddy Sam LARPing dead parasite is telling.

Shit Posting Might have more power than previously thought.

Even without copy cats, parasites will uncomfortable with this public sentiment.

But they never discuss why the pedons would feel sucn a way

I would assume CIA has a list of vulnerabilities in processors /mobos that they can exploit

I mean we pretty much can be certain that we're all being surveilled to some extent all the time.

Hardware backdoors are extremely expensive & taxes aren't enough to cover it

I wouldn't say stop intelligence agencies, but more like, slow them the fuck down. Because we know that they're going through tons and tons of paperwork to do it all legally as possible. So, it'll take them potentially years to construct a bit of a case to pursue whatever it is that they feel is worth their time to pursue someone over.

The same way we know there's nothing wrong with drugs that are pushed en mass. We don't.

You need to think about what a backdoor looks like for different devices, and different functions of that device. "Backdoor" generally means a way to bypass security measures, but that entails can vary wildly in different contexts. For some things you can know because you can check to see if the hardware is doing what's expected because the only meaningful backdoor would be local to the hardware.
For example, hardware based encryption systems can have their outputs compared against a trusted implementation of the same algorithm.

For cases where there isn't an objective source of truth for "proper functioning", or where complex inputs are accepted and either produce a simple answer (access granted/denied), or a complex behavior (logging login attempts and network calls are always expected) it can be harder to the point of impossibility to know that what's being done is correct.
This is also the case for bugs, so it can actually be unclear if something is a backdoor or an error.
"Any sufficiently hair brained programming error is indistinguishable from an attack by a nation state threat actor". (the goto fail bug is a great example of this. extremely dumb error every programmer has made, or a very well executed and sophisticated attack.

Ultimately, any system can be compromised by a sufficiently determined attacker. Security cannot be perfect, because at some point you need to trust someone.
The key is to decide how much you trust each system to handle whatever you need it to handle.
I trust my phone's manufacturer as much or more than I trust the network provider. If I'm doing something naughty the person I'm communicating with getting snagged leads to me via the network and their device without needing to compromise my hardware. I choose to focus on the weak link: the people I talk with who might be unable to properly conduct a criminal conspiracy, and getting them up to speed.