How secure is the hardware that we use? With recent NSA revelations - question rises - do we have these already embedded into popular hardware?

Hardware Trojans are created with intentional and malicious changes to hardware’s initial design. And are almost impossible to detect.

The demonstration below from DEFCON-16 shows

  • Thermal trojan - Exposes data via thermal emission

  • Optical - Invisible data transmissions via the regular Power-LED

  • Radio - Additional pins causing radio emission.

Sources:

Demonstration of Hardware Trojans - Presentation - PDF

CVORG @ DEFCON-16