Bro lost his shit in the edits section

You know that it is. Simple as that. Especially phones. Thing is, most of what you do isn’t interesting enough to spy on. Don’t bring your phone when you do illegal activity. Otherwise don’t worry about it.

System76, Tuxedo computers and Framework may be close to what you are looking for.

But you need to think about your threat model and decide how much work/study you need to consider yourself “safe”, because the only way to be absolutely sure that your hardware is trustworthy, is too build it from the scratch.

“I’M NOT INTERNET SHOUTING”, he internet shouted.

There’s a chance, OP, that you might have carbon monoxide poisoning if it’s true that you “became paranoid all of a sudden”. For anyone with gas appliances, regularly check that your CO detectors are working.

I don’t mean this as a diss or to invalidate your (totally valid) concerns about data privacy.

You can’t know. There’s no possible way to verify what any of it is doing.

Unless you’ve built your own hardware out of discrete components and know personally what every byte in the code does, you absolutely cannot know what’s actually going on in there.

And honestly, a large chunk of both consumer harware and networking certainly is spying on people.Every ISP and major datacentre has a TLA room that mere mortals aren’t allowed to go into or ask questions about, every phone or motherboard chipset is an absolute rats nest of backdoors and telemetry - and unless you sand the lid off every single chip and go over it with an electron microscope, there’s no good reason to assume any component only does what it claims to. But then the data from that will need to be stored on something likely-pwned anyway.

Various governments all have the ability to count your nose hairs if they wanted to - and if you’re sufficiently anomalous, you may as well assume they have.

to all of which I say meh. It’s evil and hideous of course, but so many things are evil and hideous that you just have to triage.

Easy. It’s far too expensive to implement, both in money and man-hours. Especially man-hours.

The amount of people required to personally surveil the general populace is way too exorbitant, AND they have to monitor their own people to prevent leaks. The logistics explodes well before this becomes feasible.

Then there’s discoverability. Once such hardware is out there, it’s only a matter of time before it falls into the hands of someone capable of dissecting it. Given that such spying methods would be ‘sold’ to federal management on the grounds of national security, there’s an interest in not having it fall into such hands. Therefore, these methods are reserved for high-profile targets. Not the average Joe citizen.

To summarize: Too expensive (money), too expensive (logistics), and too expensive (R&D). Unless you’re on Interpol’s most wanted list or something, you don’t need to worry about this.

Why did you suddenly become paranoid about specifically your hardware chips spying on you?

If you’re trolling that’s okay. If not: Please talk to someone. A real person who can check if you’re alright.

So here’s the brief take, you don’t know. Firmware is a very opaque thing that will never be truly visible without outright scanning the chip structures and relevant exchange mechanisms. A recent article demonstrated bypassing the Windows full disk encryption through a hardware hack using consumer available SOCs even.

What you can do is control the environment. Data can be extracted through a mess of crazy ways. ICMP and DNS calls can be used to tunnel traffic even. The goal for the end user is mitigation. There has been research where data was pulled via the sounds a spinning disk made even off an air-gapped device. Layering the controls makes it that much less likely that anything can compromise all the controls at once. There is no silver bullet solution however. High security systems are often custom fabricated and even then it’s possible a supply chain injection can compromise the product.

Your best bet as a consumer is to trust in the math (crypto) and ensure your data is encrypted at rest and in flight. Keeping keys on a separate vault, generated away from the protected system where possible is a more extreme but possible solution when you control all parts of the communications.

Throw it on pihole, you can see all traffic coming and going through your house. Also a great anti-advertise option.

In my experience, theres a lot less spying and a lot more BS/bad scripts checking in, but you do you.

You can use wireshark to see every packet that goes through your router. Any weird unauthorized packets? Probably spying.

LIKE ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT TOP CYBERSECURITY WORKERS OR ELITE HACKERS ARE JUST HOPING THEIR HARDWARE IS NOT SPYING ON THEM AND THERE IS NO WAY FOR AN ELITE HACKER OR CYBERSECURTY WORKER TO ENSURE THEY ARE NOT BEING SPIED BY THEIR HARDWARE

Yes.

Professional ELITE HACKERS who work for governments need to leave their electronic devices outside secure facilities for precisely this reason.

Similarly, government networks that are air gapped have their hardware physically destroyed when it’s decommissioned because it’s impossible to be sure that it’s secure.

You have made me paranoid now, well more paranoid . Someone need to answer this asap.

You don’t. It’s possible that the firmware or bootloader is doing evil things. They have access to hardware in a way your OS may not detect.

The seminal paper in this area is On Trusting Trust. That link isn’t to the original, but it has a nice overview.

The best way to prevent this kind of spying is through air gaps: ie, no network. Realistically, most of us don’t want to do that.

At some point, you need to ask yourself what your threat model is. If you’re going to have severe consequences from doing something in range of the device, maybe you wanna do it elsewhere.

Bypass*

If you filtered your data through enough servers, or even better, split your outgoing data through multiple servers, encrypting and bouncing each of the packets multiple times, maybe have a couple filters… Your shit could still be spying on you because you are attracted to the network, and you need to talk out somehow, and unless you watched the chips be manufactured put together yourself you can’t be sure they aren’t corrupted.

That said, are you a foreign dignitary? Are you someone worth investing millions into taking down? Any minute a ninja could take you down in your day to day life, there just aren’t that many ninjas, and you aren’t worth taking down.

I can’t find the article because Google is the enshittiest now, but a couple years ago a tech journalist paid 2 different hackers to infiltrate his home system (him taking slightly more precaution than he normally would), he had no chance in keeping them out, he closed the article with a quote similar to the warning above.