alt Hacker NewsMediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Xiaomi could put any backdoor that the government tell them to install and TSMC won't be able to catch that.
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Do you say the same about Intel, Amd, etc. or is it only big bad China?
There are already American backdoors on intel and AMD chips everywhere, we call them ME and PSP. Switching to chinese tech won't make it worse.
Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.
TSMC doesn't care what you put in your CPUs. Apple could tell them they want to build a CPU where 90% of the transistor footprint is for a new CIA Engine that takes pictures of your feet every three seconds to trace where you've been from the smell and TSMC's response would be "how many wafers do you want?".
I'm unaware of any actual hardware backdoors introduced by primary manufacturers in practice, especially those installed in Xiaomi hardware.
There are accounts of interdiction and post-manufacturing compromises, such as those revealed in the Snowden leaks (2013) and most recently by reporting about the Israeli security services' sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and 2-way radios. These projects didn't expose primary manufacturers to the reputational and legal risk of association.
Until there's evidence of backdoors implanted by these companies, it's better to adopt a "trust but verify" approach and use standard layered security practices to detect intrusion. Conventional network intrusion and insider threat campaigns carry less risk of failure and are simpler and cheaper to execute.