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MediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Xiaomi could put any backdoor that the government tell them to install and TSMC won't be able to catch that.
by szatkus 23d ago
MediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Xiaomi could put any backdoor that the government tell them to install and TSMC won't be able to catch that.
- Dah00n 23d agoDo you say the same about Intel, Amd, etc. or is it only big bad China?
- InTheArena 23d agoThere's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things - starting with clipper. Pushback is not always successful - but it's far more transparent then China.
- linkregister 23d agoAre there any documented cases of backdoors being present in Chinese hardware at time of manufacturing?
- bryant 23d agoTwo just this year, CVE-2026-66747 and CVE-2026-11405.
- linkregister 23d agoThose are both great examples. I think this doesn't obliterate my point, though it weakens it. The manufacturer in CVE-2026-11405 is already out of business, and the one in CVE-2026-66747 is unlikely to continue as a going concern. Would Xiaomi or the CCP accept the reputational and legal risk of getting caught with a backdoor? Recall the CCP considered the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada as an offense against itself.
- hedora 23d agoProbably, but you are asking the wrong question: Is it legal to produce non-backdoored networked devices or services in China? The answer to that question in the US is within epsilon of “no” thanks to the cloud act. Europe and China have passed similar laws. However, China has a reputation for passing laws then selectively enforcing them. Maybe if you get on the right side of the right party member, the answer might still be “Yes” there. Anyway, the next question to ask is: Who would I rather backdoor my device? I doubt the Chinese government cares much about me, and unless I vacation there it’s an international incident if they, say, hack my car and murder me by aiming it at a tree at 95mph, like the CIA apparently does now: https://www.motor1.com/news/138679/wikileaks-claim-cia-hack-cars/#:~:text=WikiLeaks%3A%20CIA%20can,%22potential%20mission%20areas.%22 https://www.motor1.com/news/138679/wikileaks-claim-cia-hack-... Of course, the US government banned cars from China. Presumably this is because they do not have the mandated remote murder network port open, or, if they do, the US doesn’t have the necessary permissions to access it.
- holoduke 23d agoToo many propoganda leads to expressions like yours. Sorry your story has zero foundation and is fox news quality.
- hedora 23d agoLike a stopped clock, Fox News is right once or twice a day. For instance election tampering in the US is a well-documented thing: However it almost always favors republicans in districts with electronic voting machines that do not generate paper trails. As for the person you are replying to, their claims have been documented by most media outlets, places like wikileaks, and their claims are backed by US legal requirements to backdoor stuff (like the US Cloud act).
- Barrin92 23d ago>There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things A bit of selective memory necessary for that take given good old Crypto AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
- szatkus 23d agoMy opinion about Trump is as bad as the next guy's, but we still have better relation with the USA than with China. And it's not like we have much choice.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 23d agoThere are already American backdoors on intel and AMD chips everywhere, we call them ME and PSP. Switching to chinese tech won't make it worse. Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.
- graemep 23d ago> Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something. Why would they not do the same? They are very pro-surveillance for a start.
- tensor 23d agoHopefully the same pushback that has so far stopped the worst of chat control would help. But even if not having more western alternatives would be very welcome. If you're in the US it may not resonate with you, but as a Canadian currently reading ongoing rhetoric about being annexed by the US I'd love to have options if things continue to go south with the status quo.
- eigenform 23d agoIt's good to be skeptical about how we implement the idea of a "root of trust" in these machines, but matter-of-factly characterizing ME and PSP as "backdoor" is misleading and not useful.
- BiteCode_dev 22d agoAfter xkeyscore and prism, it would be naive to say otherwise. They are backdoors, with not even very good plausible deniability. It's so on the nose it's comical.
- linkregister 23d agoI'm unaware of any actual hardware backdoors introduced by primary manufacturers in practice, especially those installed in Xiaomi hardware. There are accounts of interdiction and post-manufacturing compromises, such as those revealed in the Snowden leaks (2013) and most recently by reporting about the Israeli security services' sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and 2-way radios. These projects didn't expose primary manufacturers to the reputational and legal risk of association. Until there's evidence of backdoors implanted by these companies, it's better to adopt a "trust but verify" approach and use standard layered security practices to detect intrusion. Conventional network intrusion and insider threat campaigns carry less risk of failure and are simpler and cheaper to execute.
- sundbry 23d ago[flagged]
- qmr 23d agoYou can refute their statement without personal attacks. Not knowing a thing makes someone uninformed, not retarded.
- linkregister 23d agoMy retardation status is unrelated to my statement. You assert there are top secret register values but without any evidence beyond your most recent psilocybin trip. The existence of undocumented hardware behavior isn't proof of anything.
- RiverCrochet 23d agoGet off the short bus twin. CPU backdoors do no good unless there is cooperation with network driver code or the CPU itself has full operating system with a full network stack. Intel's ME comes really close to that, but I don't think Intel's ME has drivers for every possible NIC and bus a NIC can appear on in its little Minix. So, just put a Broadcom NIC in a PCIe slot and leave the Intel onboard NIC empty, or LAN facing only. Xiaomi may get Chinese 4G/5G baseband chip manufacturers to put in backdoors in Chinese phones, but they're not needed - the Chinese government pretty much already has total control of its Internet. For other countries, how are they going to make Qualcomm provide something undocumented CPU instructions can access.
- well_ackshually 23d agoTSMC doesn't care what you put in your CPUs. Apple could tell them they want to build a CPU where 90% of the transistor footprint is for a new CIA Engine that takes pictures of your feet every three seconds to trace where you've been from the smell and TSMC's response would be "how many wafers do you want?".