81–90 of 818 posts
> One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Intel and AMD are both USA based companies. Is it conceivable their processors contain backdoors in a similar vein?
>Amazon’s security team conducted its own investigation into AWS’s Beijing facilities and found altered motherboards there as well, including more sophisticated designs than they’d previously encountered. >...the malicious chips were thin enough that they’d been embedded between the layers of fiberglass onto which the other components were attached >...that generation of chips was smaller than a sharpened pencil tip,…
> I hope this corrects the mistaken believe that China can't home grow sophisticated tech. There's nothing particularly sophisticated about what they did, especially given what China has access to as one of the central hubs of tech manufacturing. There are two dozen nations (or more) that could do this from a strictly technical standpoint (few have the kind of required supply chain access to pull it off at scale in a…
One question though. Would a politically correct, by-the-book US president have had the balls to sanction China? Considering such sanctions could affect the US economy.
Further, those with insight about how to use the backdoor definitely made use of them. This is one of the central issues with government-mandated backdoors. They are introduced for one group but used by others.
When will this stuff finally have consequences for China? Their behavior, not their communication, has been overtly hostile for a while. Yet, very few politicians openly adress the issue.
Never, unless hardware manufacturing will take off somewhere else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, wow this is both incredible and crazy! Both the China-side hacks and your side's anti-hack. Mind. Blown. Second, would have it been cheaper to manufacture somewhere more trustworthy (another country?) instead of spending all this time/money on your anti-hack systems?
I think what is described is an issue with process. If the device is sealed with an anti-tampering system then the contents must be checked by a trusted entity before being sealed. Trying to guess the contents of a box that you cannot open sounds a bit like madness.
Use X-ray? or whatever can penetrate the exterior shell
"Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not."
So the chip shown in the article looks like a typical SMD balun, it is a type of transformer used to adapt impedance between two transmission line. It’s designed to replace a series a lumped element (capacitor, inductors, resistors) normally used for impedance adaptation (in a T or Pi network). The most common used for the device is directly between an antenna an a RF front-end to serve as an antenna tuner. Technical…
The chips on Elemental servers were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, according to one person who saw a detailed report prepared for Amazon by its third-party security contractor, as well as a second person who saw digital photos and X-ray images of the chips incorporated into a later report prepared by Amazon’s security team. Gray or off-white in color, they looked more like signal conditioning couplers, another common motherboard component, than microchips, and so they were unlikely to be detectable without specialized equipment.
> One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Intel and AMD are both USA based companies. Is it conceivable their processors contain backdoors in a similar vein?
I will certainly show this to everybody who tells me "google won't get hacked" when privacy comes up :) Talking about things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18074097
I take a different view of this. Some 30 companies got this hardware, two are named as having the resources to find the offending hardware. By this logic you’re still safer using a company such as Amazon.
In other words, if you have plans to ever be a politician that china may not want in any position of power, don't store your nudes on icloud/dropbox/google drive, or they may suddenly get leaked when you least expect it and ruin your career in favor of a more... Shall we say "convenient"? ...alternative.
I have worked in card payment industry. We would be getting products from China with added boards to beam credit card information. This wasn't state-sponsored attack. Devices were modified while on production line (most likely by bribed employees) as once they were closed they would have anti-tampering mechanism activated so that later it would not be possible to open the device without setting the tamper flag. Once…
First, wow this is both incredible and crazy! Both the China-side hacks and your side's anti-hack. Mind. Blown. Second, would have it been cheaper to manufacture somewhere more trustworthy (another country?) instead of spending all this time/money on your anti-hack systems?