On Thursday, August 9th, at the Black Hat conference, Christopher Domas, a renowned computer security expert, introduced the audience to the amazing news. It turns out that at least some Intel x86 processors have hidden backdoors that allow you to take complete control of your computer.
Domas discovered the backdoor by accident, sending different sets of instructions to his old VIA C3 Nehemiah processor, released in 2003, and suddenly it turned out that the processor enthusiastically executes some commands completely meaningless for a Linux system, putting the user in "God Mode".
Domas could not believe his eyes, deciding that this could not be, and therefore all this is either a factory defect or a system error. Therefore, for several weeks he assembled old machines with exactly the same processors from his acquaintances, after which he tested each chip for several more weeks.
And as it turned out, the architecture of the studied chip model has a coprocessor, which is not reflected in the documentation, but whose commands have the highest priority over all other commands of the main microcircuit. That is, "God Mode" is registered there by default, at the manufacturer's level.
Access to the coprocessor, according to Domas, is not at all difficult for a specialist - you can enter there from the interface of any operating system. At the same time, the security protocols of the system itself, some antiviruses do not matter at all, since the command sent to the coprocessor is absolutely meaningless for the system.
In a detailed review of his discovery, Domas writes that “the good news is that this backdoor only exists on the VIA C3 Nehemiah chips released in 2003 and used in embedded systems and thin clients. The bad news, however, is that it's possible that such hidden backdoors exist on many other chipsets. These are black boxes that we trust, but there is no way to look into them. These backdoors probably exist elsewhere."
None of the editorial staff of The Big The One is such a clarified specialist to have a discussion with Mr. Domas about registers and chipsets, but in the last thesis we have to correct him. These kinds of hidden coprocessors with an incomprehensible package of instructions do not "probably exist somewhere else", but exist everywhere, in every main processor of a computer, phone, modern TV or other device, giving the manufacturer full control and access. By pure coincidence, the coprocessor was found in the processor of 2003, but what is shoved into the microcircuits in 2018 will be discovered either very slowly, or will never be discovered at all.
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