Experts claim that Snowden documents have revealed that Cavium chips may have a US government backdoor installed.

Matthew Green, a professor and cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, has revealed documents leaked by Edward Snowden , a former National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee. Cavium, a fabless semiconductor company acquired by Marvell Technology in 2018, posted on SNS that it was discovered that its chips may have an NSA backdoor.

Thread by @matthew_d_green on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1703959863796158678.html

In a post to X on September 19, 2023, Mr. Green posted, ``There has been a new leak from the Snowden documents.'' The image posted by Mr. Green reads, ``While working on documents from the Snowden Archive, the authors of the paper listed an American fabless semiconductor CPU vendor called Cavium as a ``valid CPU vendor'' that had successfully siginted. Coincidentally, this CPU was the same as the one installed in my Internet router (UniFi USG3).The complete Snowden archives document the history of such behavior. It should be made available to academic researchers for a deeper understanding.'

New leak from the Snowden documents. pic.twitter.com/L0bOxAKoD3

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 19, 2023

According to Mr. Green, although the chip in question appears to be a normal cryptographic algorithm, it is actually carrying out an ``algorithm replacement attack'' using an algorithm that contains an NSA backdoor.

The formal name for this stuff is “algorithm substitution attacks.” Basically, you replace a cryptographic algorithm with a different one that “looks the same” from the outside, but contains a trapdoor for the NSA to exploit.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 19, 2023

The sentence that Mr. Green cited in his first post is from a paper (PDF file) published in March 2022 by Jacob Appelbaum, an American independent journalist familiar with security technology.

When this was pointed out to him, Green said, ``This was a first for me.I was the first to read all of Cisco/Cavium's Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) security policies after the initial information was released.'' I mean, I'm the only person who knows about this.'

Or rather, the only person that I know.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 20, 2023

In a thread on the social news site Hacker News that featured Mr. Green's post, one user wrote, ``This backdoor is almost certainly based on the backdoor random number generator ' Dual_EC_DRBG ' implemented as NIST SP 800-90A. ” he commented .

In response, another user pointed out , 'Is there any evidence that Dual_EC_DRBG is a backdoor? All I know is that Dual_EC_DRBG can be backdoored.' 'This algorithm is complex and slow; compared to competing algorithms that are much simpler, more secure, and faster. Most importantly, there is no reliable way to backdoor competing algorithms. 'Dual_EC_DRBG has a laughably easy method, so the only reason to use Dual_EC_DRBG would be to introduce backdoor functionality.'

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