Processors and chips are required to have backdoor to allow command and control access.
Sauce?
Oh the NSA shoved in spyware into hard rive firmware. I am sure so sure they put an end to that.
https://www.theregister.com/2015/02/17/kaspersky_labs_equation_group/
Yeah, I was about to say hard drives, GPUs, CPUs, Bluetooth, WiFi, USB, microcontrollers, I\O controllers, damn near every proprietary chip and likely some open chips too. I am sure that you could build a circuit in such a way as to use fully analogue, no chips design to create some sort of traceable data and still have it do some unrelated "real" task in a valid way.
That doesn't say it's required. That says Intel put it there as a feature.
Roll your own ARM and you can be sure what's in it although I think they typically include stuff like ME
(post is archived)