Hector Martin

(as a TL;DR, the hardware is user-verifiable, and the FPGA-based approach makes it infeasible to build universal backdoors into the main IC)

It's an adversary with unknown capabilities and 10B yearly budget. You can replace NSA with any other infinite-resource adversary. I.E. Signal is not invulnerable to exploits.

if you're a ‘person of interest’ for any of a number of agencies, you're screwed. even if you're not in the Internet. but in most cases, this is just a search for a good tool against a resource & time-bounded adversary.

(btw. the _disclosed_ US intel budget for 2020 was USD 8.58e10 [6.27e10 'national intel' + 2.31e10 military intel)

Infinite cash can't magically build bitstream decompilation and automated backdoor injection capabilities into an FPGA. It's designed to be trustable based on how technology is fundamentally limited by reality. Read the docs.

Of course if the code has a bug they can exploit it, but it's designed to be a small system with a very small surface area to exploit, and verifiable code. You are many, many orders of magnitude more likely to be secure on Precursor than on a random Android phone.

That kind of specialized hardware stops many attacks against Signal but not all because Signal itself has a big attack surface. Particularly it wouldn't have stopped things like this.https://twitter.com/ortegaalfredo/status/995017143002509313 …