I don’t know much about security, especially at the hardware level. However, I have a question for those of you that do.
Suppose you were given a healthy budget, a team, and a few years. Would you be able to build network hardware that did not contain back doors? How healthy would the budget need to be? How skilled would the team need to be? I assume you’d have to assume most external vendors are compromised and rebuild whatever you needed from them. What would that take?
If you care about performance, then you need to start by building a fab. $100B+, and you’ll end up with government moles.
So, I assume you don’t care about performance. If you keep stuff under 100MHz or so, then you can avoid complicated signal processing.
Design for a old process, and tape out. Now, read up on decapping and reverse engineering old dies with garage-built microscopes.
Make many copies of your chips, then decap a random sample and verify they are to spec by hand. Use the rest to build a computer that can verify the output of the microscope.
You can print circuit boards using hobbyist kits on a laser printer. Since they are 1 or 2 sided, you can visually verify them.
If you can find commercially available chips that are primitive enough for you to decap, scan, reverse engineer and verify, then use those instead (following the random destructive sampling procedure above).
I don't think it would be that hard. There's RISC-V SBCs out there which the schematics are open for. I don't think it's correct to assume absolutely everything out there is backdoored/compromised. That would be an very difficult undertaking and word would get out. NSA target their attacks very finely.
Impossible. Sooner or later one of the 3 letter agencies would have somebody on your team and they would introduce multiple backdoors one way or another.
Suppose you were given a healthy budget, a team, and a few years. Would you be able to build network hardware that did not contain back doors? How healthy would the budget need to be? How skilled would the team need to be? I assume you’d have to assume most external vendors are compromised and rebuild whatever you needed from them. What would that take?