Researchers can slip an undetectable trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs

„Researchers can slip an undetectable trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs New technique bakes super stealthy hardware trojans into chip silicon.
In addition to the Ivy Bridge processor, the researchers applied the dopant technique to lodge a trojan in a chip prototype that was designed to withstand so-called side channel attacks.
The attack against the Ivy Bridge processors sabotages random number generator (RNG) instructions Intel engineers added to the processor. “
„This type of exploit seems very useful to a nation state that tramples human rights (or the NSA!), but this seems to be something that will be out of reach to most criminal organizations from a cost, effort and time perspective.“
„Everything in life is a balancing act, with compromising computer systems being no exception. Compromising hardware is incredibly powerful because it’s so difficult to detect and because of its staying power. It’s incredibly weak in that you have no portability, mobility, or re-usability. Software can spread and usually can’t be totally destroyed permanently (unless you zap all copies). Hardware cannot be easily transferred or downloaded and can be destroyed permanently. “
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/researchers-can-slip-an-undetectable-trojan-into-intels-ivy-bridge-cpus/