So some cloud service providers like Amazon use custom hardware to improve different characteristics of their servers. This also means they can control the security better, because there is nothing hidden inside their silicon since they made it. But as a consumer, you don't know if AWS itself could have hardware or firmware on these custom servers for doing stuff with your application/processes.
What I'm wondering is what you can do purely from the motherboard or server / hardware level. The types of things that can be injected directly into the circuit design or the design of some other random hardware component that you would never be able to tell from an application-layer perspective. Wondering what can be done from here.
For clarification on the types of things I am looking for, here is an example. I don't know too much about the electronics of how networking and wifi work, but maybe there is a way to add some chunk of invisible hardware that sends every instruction and 1 and 0 out to a specific local ip address or something, and then from there you could simply build applications around that to log all traffic to every server. Basically, you could know how every program is run. Wondering if this type of stuff is possible at the hardware level, or if you need more operating-system level stuff to accomplish this.
