An anonymous reader quotes a report from Computer Weekly: A doctoral thesis by American investigative journalist and post-doctoral researcher Jacob Appelbaum has now revealed unpublished information from the Snowden archive. These revelations go back a decade, but remain of indisputable public interest:

– The NSA listed Cavium, an American semiconductor company marketing Central Processing Units (CPUs) – the main processor in a computer which runs the operating system and applications — as a successful example of a “SIGINT-enabled” CPU supplier. Cavium, now owned by Marvell, said it does not implement back doors for any government.

– The NSA compromised lawful Russian interception infrastructure, SORM. The NSA archive contains slides showing two Russian officers wearing jackets with a slogan written in Cyrillic: “You talk, we listen.” The NSA and/or GCHQ has also compromised Key European LI [lawful interception] systems.

– Among example targets of its mass surveillance program, PRISM, the NSA listed the Tibetan government in exile.

These revelations have surfaced for the first time thanks to a doctoral thesis authored by Appelbaum towards earning a degree in applied cryptography from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Communication in a world of pervasive surveillance is a public document and has been downloaded over 18,000 times since March 2022 when it was first published. […] We asked Jacob Appelbaum, currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, why he chose to publish those revelations in a technically written thesis rather than a mass-circulation newspaper. He replied: “As an academic, I see that the details included are in the public interest, and highly relevant for the topic covered in my thesis, as it covers the topic of large-scale adversaries engaging in targeted and mass surveillance.” According to The Register, “Marvell (the owner of Cavium since 2018) denies the allegations that it or Cavium placed backdoors in products at the behest of the U.S. government.

Appelbaum’s thesis wasn’t given much attention until it was mentioned in Electrospaces.net’s security blog last week.