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New leak from the Snowden documents. 
To give some context, here are the contents of an initial Snowden leak from September 2013. Cavium was a leading manufacturer of cryptographic co-processors for VPN devices at that time. archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…
Just to give a sense of how important these chips are to VPN security (and without making any specific claims about this hardware) here’s the FIPS security policy for Cisco’s ASA crypto module, showing how much crypto the Cavium Nitrox chip implements. csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/pro…
Typically these chips would directly write Diffie-Hellman secret keys into memory using their internal RNG. It would be fascinating to see a detailed reverse-engineering of some of those older co-processors from the time period.
The formal name for this stuff is “algorithm substitution attacks.” Basically, you replace a cryptographic algorithm with a different one that “looks the same” from the outside, but contains a trapdoor for the NSA to exploit.
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