Intel chips could let federal spies inside your computer

Financial Review - One of Silicon Valley’s most respected technology experts, Steve Blank, says he would be “surprised” if the US National Security Agency was not embedding “back doors” inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, two of the world’s largest semiconductor firms, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.

The claims come after The ­Australian Financial Review revealed that computers made by Chinese firm Lenovo are banned from the “secret” and “top secret” ­networks of the intelligence and defence services of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand because of concerns they are vulnerable to being hacked.

Internationally renowned security research engineer Jonathan Brossard, who unveiled what Forbes described as an “undetectable and incurable” permanent back door at last year’s prestigious Black Hat conference, told the Financial Review that he had independently concluded that CPU back doors are “attractive attack vectors”.

If correct, the allegations would raise the stakes in a growing cyber cold war, and fuel claims that US snooping leaves the Chinese in the shade.

A spokesperson for Intel however said there was “no basis for these highly speculative claims”.

Mr Blank, who began his career working as a National Security Agency contractor at its Pine Gap facility, now teaches at Stanford University, writes for The Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and in 2013 was nominated by Forbes as one of the 30 most influential people in technology.

Mr Blank said when he learned the NSA had secured “pre-encryption stage” access to Microsoft’s email products via the PRISM leaks, he recognised that “pretty much all our computers have a way for the NSA to get inside their hardware” before a user can even think about applying encryption or other defensive measures.