The paranoid in me wonders though… can DRAM be backdoored? I’d bet ‘yes’, and this would be a perfect opening to introduce a huge amount of compromised hardware to the world market…
Anything can be backdoor… In, but I’m really struggling to see how you could do something useful with a dram chip. In theory, if it were smart enough, it could analyze the data that’s being stored and manipulated in some way, but there’s no way a dram module would have the processing power and brains to do anything useful with this.
And memory manipulation would be about the most it could accomplish because the dram modules themselves don’t have signal lines that can control anything. They basically have data alliance address lines, return lines, power ground and control circuitry. They can’t affect the rest of the motherboard/ computer other than subverting data… And computers tend to be pretty good at catching memory that doesn’t store data properly.
If you tried hard enough, you could figure out a scenario where this could work, but I don’t think this is something we really need to worry about.
I’m sure it can, like any component. But we’re all running computers full of chips from American companies, and the USA isn’t any more trustworthy. It’s not a huge change.
Not really. DRAM at its core is not even useful without a controller that actually provides managed access to it. Any backdoor would need to be either in the controller or a layer above for it to be functional. And controllers aren’t the issue, DRAM chips are.
The paranoid in me wonders though… can DRAM be backdoored? I’d bet ‘yes’, and this would be a perfect opening to introduce a huge amount of compromised hardware to the world market…
Anything can be backdoor… In, but I’m really struggling to see how you could do something useful with a dram chip. In theory, if it were smart enough, it could analyze the data that’s being stored and manipulated in some way, but there’s no way a dram module would have the processing power and brains to do anything useful with this.
And memory manipulation would be about the most it could accomplish because the dram modules themselves don’t have signal lines that can control anything. They basically have data alliance address lines, return lines, power ground and control circuitry. They can’t affect the rest of the motherboard/ computer other than subverting data… And computers tend to be pretty good at catching memory that doesn’t store data properly.
If you tried hard enough, you could figure out a scenario where this could work, but I don’t think this is something we really need to worry about.
I’m sure it can, like any component. But we’re all running computers full of chips from American companies, and the USA isn’t any more trustworthy. It’s not a huge change.
Not really. DRAM at its core is not even useful without a controller that actually provides managed access to it. Any backdoor would need to be either in the controller or a layer above for it to be functional. And controllers aren’t the issue, DRAM chips are.