Counterfeit Chips Raise New Terror, Hacking Fears

mattnyc99 writes "We've seen overtures by computer manufacturers to build in chip security before, but now Popular Mechanics takes a long look at growing worries over counterfeit chips, from the military and FAA to the Department of Energy and top universities. While there's still never been a fake-chip sabotage or info hack on America by foreign countries or rogue groups, this article suggests just how easy it would be for chips embedded with time-release cripple coding to steal data or bring down a critical network - and how that's got Homeland shaking in its boots (but not Bruce Schneier). While PopMech has an accompanying story on the possible end of cheap gadget manufacturing in China as inflation rates soar there, it's the global hardware business in general that has DoD officials freaking out over chips."

Comments

The Counterfeit Bolt Problem

[MichaelCrawford]

There's been a problem for many years, in which bolts whose heads are marked to indicate that they are high-strength, are actually made from cheaper low-grade steel, and are therefor counterfeit.

A construction worker was killed while torguing such a bolt while building the Saturn car factory. The head tore off and he fell to his death.

In the same article where I read this, a general complained that you could find broken bolts littering the ground in the path of tanks on training maneuvers.

There is a way to test bolts for strength, but it's expensive.

Re:The Counterfeit Bolt Problem

[ediron2]

seriously, since this sounds wrong (several ways), where do you say you read this and when?

I've spent ten minutes googling combinations of bolt, shear, torque, substandard, high-strength, fell, factory, saturn, construction, osha, death, died, fall-hazard, snopes, urban-legend and a dozen other word combinations... no sign of this in or out of snopes.

Testing precisely is expensive. Testing within an order of magnitude isn't: twist until the bolt-head shears. As for low-grade metal being substituted in, I know a few pipefitters that can do a so-so job identifying metal composition by looking at how the metal grinds and the color of the sparks coming off the grinder.

Already been done, but it's difficult

[smellsofbikes]

In the early 1980's, the US produced intermittently buggy chips which we sold to the USSR in full knowledge that they'd disrupt production facilities. It worked very well. Why, then, wouldn't China do the same thing?

As someone who works in chip verification, I can tell you it's very difficult with most chips to do this, as long as the chips are designed in the US -- which is still largely the case, that they're designed here and produced in fabs in China (because labor's cheap and they don't care if their workers are exposed to HF and silane as long as money's coming in.)
You know *exactly* what size your chip die is. If the silicon comes back from the fab with a different-sized die, it will be very obvious. So nobody can put extra stuff onto an existing die. Die size is the single most critical aspect of most designs, because of the cost, so existing designs are jammed just as tightly as they can possibly be. You can't put more functionality into an existing die size. The problem, then, is letting your design out. (And even then, a competent chip designer could probably spot strange material on a smaller die because they're familiar with how the layout is supposed to look.)
There are some amazing military-grade chips out there. I was reading about the Maxim DS3600 the other day -- on-chip encryption and tamper-sensing, including detecting temperature changes and reacting by blanking all the on-board memory and stored encryption keys in nanoseconds, far faster than dumping liquid helium onto the chip would be able to freeze the memory for decoding. (They use some whack process for continually load-levelling and rewriting the keys so you can't use stored oxide charge to read what was there before it got blanked, either.) That kind of stuff is on the common market, available for anyone to buy. I assume the military has better stuff yet, and espionage people even better.
At the end of the day you have to be able to trust someone or you'll just crouch in your basement. But there are ways to verify a chip's functionality and look for clearly bogus interactions. Our chip test systems make it easy to distinguish chips from different silicon lots, much less from different fabs. As always, if you buy the cheap stuff you don't know what you're getting, but if you spend the money to do some research, you'll have a much, much better idea of what you're getting. In this case, money in the millions of dollars, granted, but if you're designing military-grade stuff, well, that's why you buy from companies with a track record of producing trustworthy stuff.