標題可能會有點難懂，比較簡單的意思就是在 Snowden 當年 (2013) 洩漏的資料裡面發現了不太妙的東西，發現 Cavium (現在的 Marvell) 的 CPU 有可能被埋入後門，而他們家的產品被一堆廠商提供的「資安產品」使用。
New leak from the Snowden documents. pic.twitter.com/L0bOxAKoD3
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 19, 2023
這段出可以從 2022 年的「Communication in a world of pervasive surveillance」這份文件裡面找到，就在他寫的 page 71 (PDF 的 page 90) 的 note 21：
While working on documents in the Snowden archive the thesis author learned that an American fabless semiconductor CPU vendor named Cavium is listed as a successful SIGINT "enabled" CPU vendor. By chance this was the same CPU present in the thesis author’s Internet router (UniFi USG3). The entire Snowden archive should be open for academic researchers to better understand more of the history of such behavior.
Ubiquiti 直接中槍...
而另一方面，在 Hacker News 上的討論「Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor (twitter.com/matthew_d_green)」就讓人頭更痛了，像是當初 Cavium 就有發過新聞稿提到他們是 AWS CloudHSM 的供應商：「Cavium's LiquidSecurity® HSM Enables Hybrid Cloud Users to Synchronize Keys Between AWS CloudHSM and Private Clouds」。
而使用者也確認有從 log 裡面看到看到 Cavium 的記錄：
Ayup. We use AWS CloudHSM to hold our private signing keys for deploying field upgrades to our hardware. And when we break the CI scripts I see Cavium in the AWS logs.
Now I gotta take this to our security team and figure out what to do.
居然是 CloudHSM 這種在架構上幾乎是放在 root of trust 上的東西...