I suspect Israel has backdoor access to most CPUs.

Here is how Pegasus seems: - China has 1.5 billion people, lots of resources, would profit a lot economically if they found a way to hack iOS, etc. But yet couldn't hack it. - Israel with its 7 million people, not only hacks iOS multiple times, but does it to spy on its allies.

Now I've seen the threads analysing Pegasus' complexity, I don't know if it's been reproduced, and if it has then I guess it logically proves me wrong (the tinfoil hatter in me still thinks its right though).

Here is why:

Israel has a lot of silicon fabs or R&D centers, now it makes ZERO sense for the US to have fabs or R&D centers in Israel, since that country is (allegedly) always at the risk of being bomber for no reason at all (yeah right).

Intel has had fabs in Israek since the 80s, why not in Japan or France or the UK (France and the UK are close allies to the US and have no earthquakes or risk of being bombed), why not even Canada?

And I compared the dates of when intel started putting the Intel Management Engine in all of their CPU and the date of which they built their biggest fab in Israel, then I went down the rabbit hole of when AMD started using PSP (similar tech to Intel ME), and it coinciding with it buying a large pentesting startup in Israel, then starting to build its R&D centers there, Apple and Qualcomm have similar stories.

Obviously this is all tinfoil, and while the dates coincide it's obviously not enough.

But to each their own, and I choose to treat my tech as if it was all was backdoored already, because for me the evidence (while not enough to be sure) is enough for how much I value my privacy.

> China has 1.5 billion people, lots of resources, would profit a lot economically if they found a way to hack iOS, etc. But yet couldn't hack it.

What makes you think China can't hack iOS?

> Here is how Pegasus seems: - China has 1.5 billion people, lots of resources, would profit a lot economically if they found a way to hack iOS, etc. But yet couldn't hack it.

That you know of. Maybe they just don't indiscriminately sell the results to anybody who shows they have money. Or maybe they have different strategies for spying.

> - Israel with its 7 million people, not only hacks iOS multiple times,

NSO and friends find zero-days or buy them on the open market (not just from Israel). Citizen Lab has identified specific vulnerabilities used to install Pegasus. The exploits don't require or use CPU back doors.

... and you think Israel's smaller population somehow translates into better infiltrators than China has, but not better hackers than China has? Israel also makes better halva than China, by the way.

That kind of "logic" is what turns you into a loony raving on a street corner somewhere.

> but does it to spy on its allies.

Everybody spies on their allies, at least opportunistically. But Pegasus is a commercial product, sold to basically every government and mostly used to spy on normal people, not other governments. The people writing it have ties to Israeli spies, and I'm sure it's been used by Israeli spies, but it's general-purpose.

> Israel has a lot of silicon fabs

As far as I can tell, Israel has one facility capable of making remotely serious CPUs. It's owned by Intel. There are no phones using Intel processors.

The processors in iPhones are "Designed by Apple in Cupertino" and fabbed by TSMC in Taiwan. The processors in basically all other phones are ARM, and most of them also come from TSMC. Pegasus does not run on Intel processors, ever.

> And I compared the dates of when intel started putting the Intel Management Engine in all of their CPU and the date of which they built their biggest fab in Israel

So the fab somehow reached out into the rest of Intel and retroactively caused it to develop a heavily advertised feature?

pegasus Occam's razor:

- the smaller country hacked ios, have to sell it to recoup r&d costs, got caught many times.

- the larger country hacked ios, don't need to sell it around, haven't been caught.

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