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

Digital Picture frames.

[Lemental]

This was only the beginning. Cant wait until next holiday season.

The CIA did this...

[bockelboy]

Isn't this what the CIA did to the USSR? They purposely sold the Soviets Counterfeit CPUs and other technology so their economy would be based on faulty technology.

In fact, it culminated in the mid 80's when a brand new pipeline was turned on with turbines taken from America via a Canadian intermediary. The turbines purposely malfunctioned and the resulting blast was about 1/4 the size of Hiroshima. Taking out such an important oil pipeline made a non-trivial dent in the Soviet economy.

Look up the "Farewell Dossier".

What is old is new again.

Re:The Counterfeit Bolt Problem

[bendodge]

That is too extreme. We can't even execute people who cut up 6-year-olds and put them in freezers.

However, if executives were required to spend time IN JAIL, that might be pretty effective. Charging Mr. $$$$$$$$$ a few $$ isn't going to hurt him much. He needs to actually sit in a cell and have his photo taken for the newspaper.

Re:Already been done, but it's difficult

[Mike1024]

existing designs are jammed just as tightly as they can possibly be. You can't put more functionality into an existing die size. [...] 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. It's true that it would require extra space or rearrangement to add, say, a keylogger to a USB keyboard.

But it would require only a handful of malformed vias among millions to make your 'military grade' memory-wiping electronics get stuck at 'do not wipe' and your built-in test hardware get stuck at 'no problem'.

Just my $0.02