Submission + - Why the NSA builds its own hardware
quartertime writes: Remember Reflections on Trusting Trust, the seminal paper describing how to hide a nearly undetectable backdoor in a compiler? Here's a piece about how to hide a nearly undetectable backdoor in hardware. One can install a backdoor in the expansion ROM of a PCI card, which patches the BIOS to patch grub to patch the kernel to grant the attacker remote root access. Even after the victim reinstalls the operating system from CD, the backdoor will still be there. Given that China builds much of the world's computer hardware, I wonder whether this sort of thing is already part of the Chinese espionage playbook?