Aside from this not being a very useful comment, I think there's good cause to assume this may be a little dressed up:
"Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip" - er, what? So either they have some approach for turning silicon into a machine readable form, in which case "code breaking" makes no sense, or they're attacking the chip via its interfaces. Why mention both? Because "advanced code breaking" sounds cool.
"In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems" - advanced Stuxnet weapon? This is blatant namedropping, Stuxnet is irrelevant here being a piece of software.
"The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure." - "this is a general purpose chip that happens to be used in military applications".
"adaptable - scale up to include many types of chip" - implies there are complexity limits, so likely they've applied their process to some relatively simple piece of silicon, again suggesting some boring chip.
"found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract." - hardly uncommon, in fact the Intel CPU I'm typing this on has such a feature - for encrypted microcode updates.
Until there are more details, this vague news article is just dressing.
I assume most people on HN don't follow security and might not be familiar with the University of Cambridge's security program.
Having said that, I take issue with almost every point you made:
* Both Chris Tarnovsky and Karsten Nohl have, supported so far as I know by none of the resources of a major university, given security conference talks on processes for "Turning silicon into machine-readable form". Nohl actually has an open source package to help do it. There's nothing incredible about that claim.
* I'm not sure I follow how the most famous act of computer-aided industrial espionage isn't germane to hardware backdoors. Researchers put their work into context so people outside the field will take it seriously.
* The military uses Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux, too, both of which are general-purpose packages. You think a universally distributed backdoor in either that had escaped detection until 2012 wouldn't be relevant to national security?
* Go read Tarnovsky's blog, where he has blogged about extracting keys from silicon.
The only point you've made here that I agree with is that the attack/activation surface of these illicit features is likely to be more important than anything else.
Its nice that Chris Tarnovsky and Karsten Nohl are really awesome people, but what does that have to do with the article, other than that they work at the same place?
If I had to guess, he's being funded by the military and he is definitely fishing for money. I've seen the same kind of language before. On the other hand, as the parent comment said, these researchers are reputable and we should assume that they've actually found something. This report was just written for a different audience (generals, not engineers).
Definitely written for generals, but if the claims are true (and it wouldn't be difficult for a general to send and engineer to check it out and report back), they definitely should be thrown some money for more research
"Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip" - er, what? So either they have some approach for turning silicon into a machine readable form, in which case "code breaking" makes no sense, or they're attacking the chip via its interfaces. Why mention both? Because "advanced code breaking" sounds cool.
"In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems" - advanced Stuxnet weapon? This is blatant namedropping, Stuxnet is irrelevant here being a piece of software.
"The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure." - "this is a general purpose chip that happens to be used in military applications".
"adaptable - scale up to include many types of chip" - implies there are complexity limits, so likely they've applied their process to some relatively simple piece of silicon, again suggesting some boring chip.
"found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract." - hardly uncommon, in fact the Intel CPU I'm typing this on has such a feature - for encrypted microcode updates.
Until there are more details, this vague news article is just dressing.