NSA’s Own Hardware Backdoors May Still Be a “Problem from Hell”
...U.S. officials and policy makers have also spoken strongly about the possibility that such tactics might be in use by China, citing that government’s attitude toward the U.S. and the fact that a large proportion of all computer hardware is manufactured in the country (see “Why the U.S. Is So Afraid of Huawei”). However, until the recent reports, including a major piece in the New York Times earlier this month, there had never been specific public claims that a government was inserting secret vulnerabilities into computer hardware.

The Times report says, however, that the NSA inserted backdoors into some encryption chips that businesses and governments use to secure their data, and that the agency worked with an unnamed U.S. manufacturer to add backdoors to computer hardware about to be shipped to an overseas target....