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FBI Says Military Had Counterfeit Cisco Routers
There are new developments in the case of the counterfeit Cisco routers, which we have been discussing for some time. The NYTimes updates the story after an FBI PowerPoint presentation made its way onto the Web. It seems that experts at Cisco have examined some of the counterfeit routers in detail and proclaimed that they contain no back doors. Others don't believe we can be so sure. "Last month, [DARPA] began distributing chips with hidden Trojan horse circuitry to military contractors who are participating in the agency's Trusted Integrated Circuits program. The goal is to test forensic techniques for finding hidden electronic trap doors, which can be maddeningly elusive... The threat was demonstrated in April when a team of computer scientists from the University of Illinois presented a paper at a technical conference in San Francisco detailing how they had modified a Sun Microsystems SPARC microprocessor... The researchers were able to create a stealth system that would allow them to automatically log in to a computer and steal passwords."
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Vote for those that seek to protect you.
This seems like a scare tactic to "warn" people about the dangers of fake hardware/software. Expect a big push around these types of "stories" as more bills like PRO-IP go through congress and as the creation of the IP & Copyright Czar in the Whitehouse gets a big push.
It's a concern but seems to point more to incompetence rather than some difficult-to-spot threat. Why are government agencies not buying directly from Cisco? Seems they should have some sort of corporate connection.
"We must protect our precious bodily fluids."
Outsourcing critical components is always bad,
but when you outsource DIRECTLY to countries that
A: do not like you and make little attempt to hide it
B: are actively engaging in espionage, known and unknown
C: have no distinctions between state and corporation, commerce and warfare
Hand in your commission and your cover, you fucked up.
You've hit the fubar trifecta. Your command is terminated.
There is no excuse for this in a trillion dollar army. Good day.
Items with high capital costs don't work well as "open source;" basically, the manufacturing plants costs so many billions of dollars that no one who isn't doing proprietary work could afford it. Even if you could open source chip design (a dicey proposition, since there are many fewer EE Phds that want to donate time than there are CS Phds,) there are still difficulties with the actual manufacturing, and we would still need to guarantee the physical chips, which are individual, and cannot be "re-compiled;" if you think there may be an issue with a batch, you can't start over without paying for new chips.
Maybe, however, I am missing something about the procedure you are proposing; what parts would be open source?
I'm a concientious
I think RMS summed up the current US relationship with China quite well:
The rise of "IP" and corporate interests over democracy in the US has never been clearer than in the last five years. Everything you own can be confiscated for suspicion of "making available" crappy RIAA music that can be found on any radio station. Your email, web browsing, phone conversations and church can all be monitored without a warrent. Those who object will be put on "non fly lists" that are used by banks, employers even the local gym, so the accused is essentially proscribed. The military is now authorized to act against US Citizens in "an emergency". Massive voter fraud has been proved in several major elections. In short, most of the bill of rights has been violated in the interest of government and corporate power. Trade with China has not made China more free, it has made us more like them.
As you say, even domestically-produced hardware can theoretically have trojans in it, so it should be standard practice to certify everything they use, regardless of where it came from.
The outsourcing boogeyman has nothing to do with this - relying on the "USA A-OK" school of thought as some sort of defense against malicious hardware is obviously not a good idea.
It's worth noting you can do everything a Cisco router can do with a Linux box. I just built a box with Zebra and a solid state hard drve along with a 4 port network card. I have some pretty good throughput with that and I would have no trouble adding additional cards for connections to OC48s and higher.
Cisco is becoming increasingly irrelevant. They don't bring anything to the table that isn't already out there and they segment it all so it's a lot harder to manage than it needs to be.
Anyone else notice a sharp decline in the quality of Cisco products over the last 5 years?
but the copier would record all copies to flash memory
...
... whippersnappers! get off my lawn!
Flash memory... cold war? Surely you must be joking
They used a camera with a roll of film, which they then had to develop
The US invasion of Iraq has cost the US more than 4,000 servicemen and Iraq one million dead, 2.5 million refugees, an irreparable infrastructure and horrific civil war. If that's not bad enough for you, the advocacy and use of torture should be. Wake up! we are now a terrible abuser of human rights and we are doing it for oil, big fat "best year ever" oil. What we do to others we will do to ourselves sooner than later.
Sun has open-sourced the Niagra designs under the GPL, and you can license UltraSPARC from SPARC Inc. Unlike Xeons and Opterons, you can actually get SPARC CPUs from at least two manufacturers: Sun and Fujitsu.
Except connect to a SONNET network. Or a DS3 interface. Or aggregate multiple T1s. Or suport terabit switching and routing speeds.