[mdlug-discuss] [mdlug] [Fwd: [opensuse-offtopic] AndnowtheManchurianmicrochip]

[Aaron Kulkis]

Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>> From: Aaron Kulkis
>>>  Precisely my point. Absent evidence, we have no reason to believe
> the
>>> 'secret proof'.
>> The Air Force never said there were aliens...it was some
>> nut job creating hoaxes to sell his nutty books.
> 
>  I'm aware of that. 
> 
>> We're talking off-the-shelf Intel/AMD machines.
> 
>  But if there's a problem with them, more-costly options can be pursued.
> If someone stands to make money from those more-costly options, you've
> got your motive.
> 
>> If you put a sniffer on a network, and data is being sent
>> out on that network for no reason at all, you KNOW you've
>> got a problem some place.
> 
>  Evidence that this has actually happened?
> 
>> Who knows.
> 
>  I'd be a lot more inclined to believe it if I were given some data or
> even an outline of a workable design. Neither has so far been
> forthcoming.
> 
>>  But China has been pursuing cyber-network warfare
>> for over 10 years - I first heard about that threat back in
>> the mid-1990's, and at the time, I thought it to be a rather
>> preposterous idea.  But then I heard about the trojaned-printer
>> that was sent to Hussein's government, and the outbreak of
>> viruses, and I realized that the security I had taken for
>> granted on Unix and VM/CMS was far from common.
> 
>  Speaking of specific, one-shot hacks is different from widespread
> subversion.
> 
>> No, you don't need to make any such avoidance at all.
>> Since the machine has been penetrated since before an OS
>> was even installed on it, there's no sudden, noticeable
>> decrease in performance of the machine.
> 
>  *Except* that we're talking about slipping design changes in at the
> fabrication level. The people who design the chips test them, and they
> know - *very* precisely - what timings to expect. And they do their best
> to test *everything* on the chip; they *have* to. You can't do changes
> at that sort of scale without detectable deviations. Like I said before,
> the designers have every reason to use every bit of silicon to boost
> performance. The fabricators *can't* steal silicon without redesigning
> *something*, cutting into performance margins that are already cut as
> fine as the designers can get away with.

And when the motherboard assembly plant, and the chip fabs
are both in the same place, and both under People's Liberation
Army control (like ALL business in China).... 

I don't know the specifics, but a standard COTS computer (i.e.
one of the all too many hundreds of thousands or even millions
of computer the DOD owns that run Windows) is not going to be
tested for signal timings on the motherboard.

> 
>> And besides, Disk bandwidth compared to memory bandwidth
>> is low... the whole reason for DMA controllers is so that
>> the data can be sent in burst mode, so as to free up
>> the memory bus.
> 
>  But if you're doing DMA-related work at the same time, you'll see a
> major drop in performance. Dang near everything on the system uses DMA
> now.

You would notice a "major drop" if the functionality was added
in AFTER the computer was installed.  On the other hand, if the
spy-ware (hard and/or soft) was in the computer from the time
of purchase...nobody's going to notice a "major drop in performance".
At most, an admin will say, "that's how fast this machine runs,"
and not bother to investigate.  He doesn't have the tools to
investigate anyways -- We ARE talking about Windows.

Not only that, but the spy-ware doesn't have to be operating
non-stop constantly.  A busy disk drive on a quiescent system
would be noticeable...especially on a laptop.  But reading
and sending just a couple disk blocks at a time, and working
through the disk drive from start to finish would eventually
furnish a tremendous amount of data.