<story><title>Intel In Bed with NSA?</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>comex</author><text>It is really, really hard for me to see this as anything other than utter paranoia.  As one of the messages in the thread stated:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Right. How exactly would you backdoor an RNG so (a) it could be effectively used by the NSA when they needed it (e.g. to recover Tor keys), (b) not affect the security of massive amounts of infrastructure, and (c) be so totally undetectable that there&amp;#x27;d be no risk of it causing a s&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;tstorm that makes the $0.5B FDIV bug seem like small change (not to mention the legal issues, since this one would have been inserted deliberately, so we&amp;#x27;re probably talking bet-the-company amounts of liability there).</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel In Bed with NSA?</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>__alexs</author><text>The comments about RdRand being impossible to verify because it&amp;#x27;s on-chip seem quite reasonable. (Although Intel have tried to be quite open about how it works. &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/intelrdrand/references&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sites.google.com&amp;#x2F;site&amp;#x2F;intelrdrand&amp;#x2F;references&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;I have no idea if RdRand is the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; source of entropy for &amp;#x2F;dev&amp;#x2F;urandom in the kernel these days but that does seem quite silly. Especially as RdRand is documented as having two error conditions, not enough entropy, and that the hardware appears to be broken.&lt;p&gt;In any case, here&amp;#x27;s the LKML thread where it was merged too &lt;a href=&quot;http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;thread.gmane.org&amp;#x2F;gmane.linux.kernel&amp;#x2F;1173350&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>