Made in China: Backdoor Found in Chip Used by U.S. Military
May 29th, 2012Via: Information Age:
A microchip used by the US military and manufactured in China contains a secret “backdoor” that means it can be shut off or reprogrammed without the user knowing, according to researchers at Cambridge University’s Computing Laboratory.
The unnamed chip, which the researchers claim is widely used in military and industrial applications, is “wide open to intellectual property theft, fraud and reverse engineering of the design to allow the introduction of a backdoor or Trojan”, they said.
The discovery was made during testing of a new technique to extract the encryption key from chips, developed by Cambridge spin-off Quo Vadis Labs.
The “bug” is in the actual chip itself, rather than the firmware installed on the devices that use it. This means there is no way to fix it than to replace the chip altogether.
The Slashdot coverage on this mentions that he doesn’t provide any real evidence, peer review, and it seems that he’s selling software to detect the problem.
It’s more likely that he’s getting free viral advertising.
This one mentions exactly such.
http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continuity/news/2105468/security-backdoor-found-in-chinamade-us-military-chip.thtml
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/05/28/1454222/backdoor-found-in-china-made-us-military-chip
A “back door” on a chip can be pretty much worthless. You have to be able to reach it, to use it. The DoD devices that would use such a chip shouldn’t be accessible via the Internet. Well, we know how false that can be.
Still, it just sounds like he’s making noise to make a name for himself. It’s possible that he’s legit, so saying it was found could be disinformation to encourage tech to be manufactured in the US, or the gov’t covering it up by releasing it via a dubious source. Like, a big “We found your back door, so it won’t work. ha haa.”
bingo.
i’m watching this episode of the outer limits right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.B.I.T.
so i thought i’d mosey on over here, curious how far i’d have to look before i came upon some article reflecting this old episode in current reality. this article, first one right at top, will do as well as any other. this sort of stuff used to make for outrageous science fiction. i wish i had a copy of the actual teleplay script. i’m grateful wikipedia at least had a page on the episode.
is it a stretch? i don’t think so. “intellectual property theft, fraud and reverse engineering of the design to allow the introduction of a backdoor or Trojan” doesn’t say it all, that such things as the aforementioned theft or fraud, bad as they are, aren’t quite as bad as the mass covert surveillance the chip’s capabilities, if extrapolated, can facilitate.
there’s a trial in the episode where a senator questions the defense department (after being so fingered by the research lab’s head as the authority and financing behind O.B.I.T.) as to authorized them to do this. G2 intelligence, of course.
later questioning revealed not exactly everybody could be surveiled by O.B.I.T. of course. the aliens who really made the thing were immune.
agents of the justice department later rounded up all the machines and destroyed them. this was, after all, fiction. 48 and a half years ago.
—
frankly, i’ve been expecting this for years. for all the yak of NSA backdoors in Windows and the glory of open source *nix OSs, it takes damn little tinfoil to leap to thoughts of what can be put on a motherboard itself… (my first PC, a Tandy RLX1000 had no hard drive whatsoever -the OS was in a ROM chip on the motherboard. it booted virtually instantly. i never understood why later OSs weren’t also like that -but later thought it was good they weren’t. it’s moot now…)
quo vadis?
addendum to the Outer Limits O.B.I.T. episode:
http://home.earthlink.net/~markholcomb/ol/ol_obit.html
Original Outer Limits : O.B.I.T.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSCTnWEb1bU