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Are you ready for more revelations from Snowden?
Cavium, a semiconductor manufacturer acquired by Marvell in 2018, was allegedly identified in documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden as a supplier of semiconductors with backdoors for US intelligence. Marvell denies that it or Cavium installed backdoors in products at the request of the US government.
The charges appeared in Dr. Jakob Appelbaum's doctoral dissertation, "Communication in the World of Universal Surveillance: Sources and Methods: Counterstrategies against the Architecture of Universal Surveillance." Appelbaum's dissertation was published in March 2022 and did not attract much public attention until it was mentioned in a security blog post. Electrospaces.net last week.
In his dissertation, on page 71, in footnote 21, it says: "While working on documents from the Snowden archive, the author of the dissertation learned that an American manufacturer of semiconductor processors named Cavium is listed as a successful supplier of processors with the SIGINT function. By chance, it was the same processor that was in the author's router (UniFi USG3). The entire Snowden archive should be open to scientific researchers to better understand the history of such behavior."
In 2012, Appelbaum worked as an investigative journalist and technical expert alongside documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras on the Snowden leak. He left the Tor project in 2016 due to controversial allegations and subsequently enrolled at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he works as a researcher in computer science and cryptography.
It follows from the thesis that at least some Cavium products at some point contained a backdoor useful for American intelligence. Marvell disputes the existence of a backdoor.
"Marvell places the highest priority on the safety of its products," said a company spokesperson. "Marvell does not install, and Cavium did not install, backdoors for any government."
In a phone call, Applebaum told The Register, "Marvell answers a question that no one asked." He further explained in the email that Marvell may have accidentally installed a backdoor into its hardware by implementing weak and vulnerable algorithms, such as the infamous Dual EC DRBG, which was promoted by the US government to be accepted by vendors and deployed for espionage.
Cavium, a semiconductor manufacturer acquired by Marvell in 2018, was allegedly identified in documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden as a supplier of semiconductors with backdoors for US intelligence. Marvell denies that it or Cavium installed backdoors in products at the request of the US government.
The charges appeared in Dr. Jakob Appelbaum's doctoral dissertation, "Communication in the World of Universal Surveillance: Sources and Methods: Counterstrategies against the Architecture of Universal Surveillance." Appelbaum's dissertation was published in March 2022 and did not attract much public attention until it was mentioned in a security blog post. Electrospaces.net last week.
In his dissertation, on page 71, in footnote 21, it says: "While working on documents from the Snowden archive, the author of the dissertation learned that an American manufacturer of semiconductor processors named Cavium is listed as a successful supplier of processors with the SIGINT function. By chance, it was the same processor that was in the author's router (UniFi USG3). The entire Snowden archive should be open to scientific researchers to better understand the history of such behavior."
In 2012, Appelbaum worked as an investigative journalist and technical expert alongside documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras on the Snowden leak. He left the Tor project in 2016 due to controversial allegations and subsequently enrolled at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he works as a researcher in computer science and cryptography.
It follows from the thesis that at least some Cavium products at some point contained a backdoor useful for American intelligence. Marvell disputes the existence of a backdoor.
"Marvell places the highest priority on the safety of its products," said a company spokesperson. "Marvell does not install, and Cavium did not install, backdoors for any government."
In a phone call, Applebaum told The Register, "Marvell answers a question that no one asked." He further explained in the email that Marvell may have accidentally installed a backdoor into its hardware by implementing weak and vulnerable algorithms, such as the infamous Dual EC DRBG, which was promoted by the US government to be accepted by vendors and deployed for espionage.
