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Say whatever you will about the CCP: there’s nobody on earth burning the level of resources needed to do that undetectably and reliably on some tourist pleb’s arbitrary hardware.
More power to you if that’s what you wanna spend energy on, though.
Half a dollar for the hardware and they already have the manpower there. Certainly not bugging any random device, but there is always the chance and its certainly not unheard of. I'm a security researcher, that might be a red flag. But somebody posting on Lemmy might also be considered an activist and certainly somebody trying to enter the country with a heap of encrypted devices.
Genuine curiosity: What kind of hardware bug would you go for if you wanted to spy on a relatively easy target like a Thinkpad from ten years ago, and had 1-2 hours to install it?
My naive guess would be intercepting the monitor cable to pull occasional screencaps, but then you’d need a wireless modem to transmit out and you’d have pretty serious limitations on power draw (assuming you’re running off a cell battery and not splicing in somewhere).
Hardware bugs are put on the storage. Allows injecting data into ram or backdooring the OS.
I can absolutely see that making sense for a targeted attack.
Are there bootkits in the wild that can reliably bootstrap to a rootkit on most non-Windows hosts these days? The hard part of that approach would be having a bootkit payload sophisticated enough to escalate to a meaningful form of exfiltration, I imagine.
Backdooring initrd is standard stuff. This allows Luks key extraction and upload via staging through the root fs.