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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."
Verification of the producer is essential here - and this is perhaps the moment where outsourcing will bite us in the ass. While you can only buy american made cisco routers, there is no doubt some chipsets made in it are manafactured overseas.
From what I understand, the counterfeit routers are made in the same factories by the same people who make the real routers; they just keep the assembly line running past the hours that Cisco is paying them for.
In this case, if Cisco is comparing the counterfeit routers to their legit ones, they should always be the same.
The question this doesn't answer is this: does the LEGIT Cisco equipment contain back doors? How can Cisco be sure it doesn't? Most of the components are manufactured offshore and the assembly is done offshore. Have they examined each part with an electron microscope to verify it doesn't do anything more than what the spec says it should do?
They can't just watch for network activity; these routers might be filtering and caching data waiting for the eventual physical removal of the router in the next upgrade cycle -- or, they might all have a kill switch built in, so someone can remotely take out ALL routers. There are an infinite number of possibilities to look for, and since Cisco doesn't manufacture everything in-house, they really don't have much hope of detecting that none of the infinite possible modifications have been made.
I work for a company that sells used electronics on eBay. We'll occasionally buy cheap gear over eBay too, then resell it at a profit. For many months now we've had a huge problem with counterfeit Cisco cards. It's amazing how detailed the counterfeiters are. My boss wrote up a detailed guide on how to spot fakes. Google "counterfeit cisco wic".
... of the DARPA-hacked routers were any of the 'cisco experts' able to determine tampering?
That seems like a logical test, so I have to wonder if they have done it already... or not?
If they contain no backdoors, *THAT WE CAN FIND*, do we continue using them?
I merely skimmed one article which said that Cisco examined the routers and found no backdoors. The Ministry of Peace is probably just trying to test the sneakiness of their own snooping electronics in the name of "national security". The trojans which are found are omitted and the ones which aren't found make it to the production runs. Oh, and before all of this happens, they have the Ministry of Truth spread FUD about Eastasia doing it "first", even though Cisco checked the counterfeit routers and found nothing suspicious. To paraphrase what another slashdotter said a little while ago, "...the government is using 1984 as an instruction manual." They even got Emmanuel Goldstein right: instead of making him advocate freedom, they chose a more unlikeable character(and will chose others like him): Osama Bin Laden.
More like any company that outsources and doesn't perform internal quality control of what they are reselling should be made criminal in this instance of reselling to governmental agencies. Buy a Cisco, throw it in a private LAN sandbox, fire up Wireshark. Rinse, lather, repeat. Yawn...
Anne McCaffrey wrote a book called PartnerShip with a plot very similar to this situation. The villian provides chips to the Galaxy, including the military. When nearly everyone has upgraded, it turns out that he can remotely control every device, including military hardware, controlled by the chips. That's enough of a spoiler. How can such a grand and well planned scheme be defeated? You'll have to read to find out...
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."
So that's why my crappy Linksys wifi access points have to be rebooted every week or so. Damn commies!!!
CIA slipped bugs to Soviets
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
That said, it's pretty low on the list of likely threats. Pretty hard to know exactly what gear will be placed where and what it will give you access to. Plus even with a back door, places with sensitive data are more likely to be monitoring the traffic which is harder to hide.
For those of you who are interested, you can find more technical details of how we designed and implemented malicious hardware from here
-- computer scientists from University of Illinois
if your new rack mount routers and switches say "crisco" on the front you may have a problem.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
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
The question is not whether Cisco routers have back doors. That has to be assumed. If I was running NSA over the last several decades, I would have my people deep inside every communication equipment manufacturer. The manufacturers management might not even know about it.
The NSA surely has arranged to have one or more back doors designed into virtually every kind of communications switch. The only Cisco employees who would know about them would be the NSA people who work inside Cisco, and some regular Cisco employees who have been cleared. If this has not been done, the NSA senior managers should be fired or jailed.
The real questions are: How many back doors are there? and who has the keys? The (assumed) NSA back door might not be the only one. There is a possibility that the Chinese or Indian chip-fab or software contractors have also installed back doors for their own governments.
With billion-gate machines, a few thousand extra gates would be hard to see. If the extra logic looks like instruction-cache, but just has a little extra code, it would be almost impossible.
Lets see. A non free society that can barley feed its people now. That has a huge number of people that is now comming into the industrial age and is going to NEED all the energy it can get its hands on very soon is an enemy to be to all who are near.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
I had subscribed to RMS's politcal RSS feed for a while, but the continuous stream of unhelpful thought along the lines of your quoted fragment became too much.
Clinton, Bush, et al. are just flexing the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Act. If you want my attention, tell me how we're going to restore the separation of powers written within the United States Constitution, and require a President to get a proper declaration of war before galavanting. Short of that, what are you doing but setting yourself up for More Of Same, sir?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You know twitter, my dad and his brothers lived through Argentina's "Dirty War". I didn't really understand what they went through until I was a little older and he asked me to play (and pay attention to) one of his old LP records. It's amazing how a simple song will open our eyes to things you can't grasp when they are explained in other ways. If you ever have a chance to listen to "Yo Te Nombro" (would translate roughly to "I Say Your Name") by Nacha Guevara, do take the opportunity to do so. It's a powerful statement of all the things you lose (the most important of which is your own humanity) in an environment of total and complete repression.
I doubt you will ever stop humping the "I hate M$" horse, but maybe what you need is to have some sense of measure when you talk about what a horrible place the US has become now that the RIAA can search your computer, just so you can make a point about your racially-charged dislike of China, which I assume is no different from the one you've displayed in the past towards India and other countries.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
This is all coming down to the fact that we need to assume NO network is secure; that we may be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks even within our own networks.
The solution is not to verify every chip, because that's probably impossible. Somebody's going to sneak something in somewhere. The solution is to make all data that travels through the chip unintelligible -- e.g. point-to-point encryption for *all* connections.
Once you encrypt all communications, the biggest security concern becomes the endpoints, not the myriad of things in between.
arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority. - check! It's just in other countries. the government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler. - check! The executive branch has been heading towards full dictatorial powers and can now "legally" seize them in case of an emergency, in so many words. oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler. - check! In my opinion just the laws against victimless crime are sufficient to qualify. One percent of our population is in prison. And while we ostensibly do not permit cruel or unusual punishment, not only do we kill people for crimes (as if it solved anything) but we do it in horribly inhumane ways; while hanging has gone out of vogue (breaking or at least damaging someone's neck and strangling them by their own weight, which can take minutes) we still electrocute people (causing their body to dance, shake, twitch, and convulse for some time) or use a gas chamber (in which you have ample time to think about your impending death.) At least the lethal injection is relatively "humane" (as if putting someone to death unnecessarily after our social system has by definition failed them could ever be termed as such.) undue severity or harshness. - The system is full of it! Shit, you can potentially get sent to jail for years for copying a DVD for personal use! This government is completely out of control and just because it's worse in other places doesn't mean it's not bad here. Your standards are just so low that you're willing to put up with a government which repudiates everything this nation ostensibly stands for and deliberately causes pain and suffering in the name of profit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"