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

ARRRGH! TERROR!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

EVERYTHING is now a "terror threat".

Do you suppose someone figured out that "terror" is a funding goldmine? That the way to ride this gravy-train was to pump up the volume on the "terror" megaphone?

It's pretty funny - 'til the unintended consequences land you "in internal exile", or "extraordinary rendition".

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.

Digital Picture frames.

[Lemental]

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

Re:TFA

[zappepcs]

I think you are pretty much right on target. An errant USB stick with malicious firmware could easily wait until it is plugged into a machine on a network with the desired domain name before releasing a small virus. It is not implausible, nor hard to understand this attack vector. That USB stick might be in the form of a cheap MP3 player.

Without spraying details all over, there are many more ways to get a small piece of code inside a very secure facility, after which it's game on for the IDS system.

Even if nothing is found in the wild like this, fear of it might indeed push DRM et al into all manner of devices.

On the short list: Secure facilities should not be allowing electronic devices into their facilities. period. if they want to stay secure. No DRM should be trusted to fully do this job in such instances of security like are required for the Pentagon, military bases etc.

Adding DRM to commercial and personal use devices will NOT... repeat NOT increase security.

That explains it!

[boristdog]

I was wondering why my new "Gatemay" computer had an "Inpel Inside!" sticker on it.

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.

Counterfeit chips not required

[OTDR]

One can find genuine reason to be worried with the US military without ever worrying over a problem so clever as counterfeit chips. US DoD has routinely exhibited worrisome practices for years.

I work in the field of modeling & simulation supporting training and flight testing for the Army. Time and again when I've tried to find an ICD (interface control document) or spec on a low-level protocol for some box on an Apache Longbow in the end it discovered that the Government never bought said document from the manufacturer (McDonnell-Douglas, or now, Boeing). Each thing is simply an LRU (line-replaceable unit) black box whose innards are irrelevant -- the I/O is documented but when they fail the box goes back to the vendor for repair. And if you want the specs, call Boeing and they'll be happy to talk sales. US DoD acts this way in the name of "cutting costs" and the up-front bottom line probably is lower. For US companies, such as Boeing, this is no big deal since we're more or less all on the same team.

Now, flash forward -- DoD is increasingly awarding aircraft contracts to non-US companies. Take the recent US Army LUH (Light Utility Helicopter) that went to EADS North America (or the Airforce tanker contract that went likewise to EADS). This same cost-cutting "don't need this spec or that spec" mentality is still used. Now you have entire military aircraft being delivered with large-scale black boxes (easier to build than counterfeiting chips) which are potentially just as rogue. Who's to say there's no malicious firmware in there? No one seems to be looking or caring. Can anyone prove that any given system isn't poised to intentionally upon receipt of some pre-planned stimuli?

There's a lot more to worry about than "terrorists" -- mindless bureaucrats can be just as dangerous. The funny thing here is the opposition I've run into pushing for the adoption of Open Source tools. Despite a few agencies here and there employing Open Source with great success, a few memos of "endorsement," and a few official studies touting value, most DoD bureaucrats can't get past the "source is open to 'hackers' therefore must be a security threat" mentality.

Department of Dumbasses, your US tax dollars at work.