It depends on how bad China wants your porn. There could be secondary MCUs that are designed to completely bypass the original firmware. (Think Intel ME)
That is not very practical for consumer grade gear, but still possible.
This reminded me of a real life story, from the tip or my tongue so details might be inaccurate, but I remember hearing that a/the main MINIX maintainer, all of the sudden, started getting bug reports or some type of feedback from somebody, that ended up being an Intel employee looking to use MINIX for either ME or AMT.
In short, these hardware devices are 100% capable of having their own independent OS, processes with kernel and all, totally obscured from the end user.
Wifi chips have their own firmware that could have a backdoor. If it’s connected to the CPU over PCI-E or another interface that supports DMA then it’s also able to inject code into the main system even if it’s running FOSS firmware.
It seems that a few router types have WiFi + SoC setups now. (Like ones using the IPQ4019, for example.)
While that doesn’t significantly reduce the risk of something nasty, it would limit places for nasty code to hide. Well, “hide” in the traditional sense, like on another chip entirely.
However, I haven’t really looked into any drivers to see how these SoC’s are segmented to see if its really any different than the old MCU + WiFi chipset setups.
It depends on how bad China wants your porn. There could be secondary MCUs that are designed to completely bypass the original firmware. (Think Intel ME)
That is not very practical for consumer grade gear, but still possible.
This reminded me of a real life story, from the tip or my tongue so details might be inaccurate, but I remember hearing that a/the main MINIX maintainer, all of the sudden, started getting bug reports or some type of feedback from somebody, that ended up being an Intel employee looking to use MINIX for either ME or AMT.
In short, these hardware devices are 100% capable of having their own independent OS, processes with kernel and all, totally obscured from the end user.
Wifi chips have their own firmware that could have a backdoor. If it’s connected to the CPU over PCI-E or another interface that supports DMA then it’s also able to inject code into the main system even if it’s running FOSS firmware.
It seems that a few router types have WiFi + SoC setups now. (Like ones using the IPQ4019, for example.)
While that doesn’t significantly reduce the risk of something nasty, it would limit places for nasty code to hide. Well, “hide” in the traditional sense, like on another chip entirely.
However, I haven’t really looked into any drivers to see how these SoC’s are segmented to see if its really any different than the old MCU + WiFi chipset setups.
Hmm, it’s pretty spicy porn.