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The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

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Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#801

Post by TheRealPomax »

xienze wrote: post #436
TheRealPomax wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: even if we ignored the fact that you cannot possibly produce the volumes of chips necessary at the price necessary in your country rather than in "we don't have to acknowledge all the human rights violations" countries, why would you believe this problem goes away if chip manufacturing were done in your own country, rather than another? The moment the option of taking control of a production line of som…

>Counterpoint: even if we ignored the fact that you cannot possibly produce the volumes of chips necessary at the price necessary in your country rather than in "we don't have to acknowledge all the human rights violations" countries, why would you believe this problem goes away if chip manufacturing were done in your own country, rather than another? It's certainly easier to enforce laws and observe manufacturing pr…

Not really, no. Why do you think it be easier to police? In concrete terms: who do you expect to do the policing? Because this is the kind of work that requires an expert, to catch an expert, messing with a product created by people 100% ignorant of _what_ they're making. Just _that_ they're making them. Where are you going find enough experts to check the work of even a single production line?

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#802

Post by TheRealPomax »

vehementi wrote: post #711
TheRealPomax wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: even if we ignored the fact that you cannot possibly produce the volumes of chips necessary at the price necessary in your country rather than in "we don't have to acknowledge all the human rights violations" countries, why would you believe this problem goes away if chip manufacturing were done in your own country, rather than another? The moment the option of taking control of a production line of som…

You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good here

Not really: I'm letting the practical dictate the process. Catching this kind of inflitration requires experts to scrutinise the work of people who know nothing about what they're making, to catch experts with a much more vested interest in success, and you aren't going to find enough experts to take that job, at a good pay, to check the output of even a single plant. Let alone an entire industry.

If the question is "why don't we move chip production to the US, so this doesn't happen" the answer is "because you might be able to do that for one or two plants. And it'll probably drive up the price by an order of magnitutde, so they'll go out of business soon after. And you sure as hell can't move the entire industry because of prohibitive cost and shortage of manpower to do the bit that you want tacked on that can't be trusted to be done abroad".

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#803

Post by TheRealPomax »

lenkite wrote: post #776
TeMPOraL wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no societies are free from organized crime. And last time I checked, no western country was free from card skimmers either.

You can prosecute someone in your home country and even change policies with enough political support. Best of luck doing this in China without getting 're-educated'.

But note that as always: that's too late. By then, the damange has already been done, and the person you take out of the system is simply replaced by anyone else. Card skimmers sure as hell haven't gone away just because we wised up to them: we now just pay A LOT MORE on law enforcement, and all that gets us is law enforcement now at least staying in lockstep with the skimmer's increased sophistication.

Now imagine how much it'll cost to stay in lockstep when the level of sophistication becomes "a single component the size of half a grain of rice".

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#804

Post by contingencies »

jki275 wrote: post #793
contingencies wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in a secure environment... where you are supposed to control the hardware, the software, and the network absolutely.

The only way to create such an environment is to totally disconnect it from the outside world -- I'm talking even power source, phones, internet, all of it has to be disconnected or else I can exfil data all day long and nobody would ever know.

Yes, but eventually you have to get something done.

Security engineering is about tolerable failure modes. - Dan Geer (2014)

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#805

Post by jessaustin »

Atlas26 wrote: post #669
odorousrex wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more telling for me is that Apple has cut off all contracts with the company involved and will have nothing more to do with them - despite their denial.

They cut off contact for a separate reason - 2000 (IIRC) supermicro boards which did have issues.

If they wanted to cut ties for a different reason, execs could have just said "find a problem with some supermicro boards, no matter how much it costs to do so, and never repeat this conversation". They are complicated human-designed and -made artifacts; of course some problem exists. This is known in other situations as "parallel construction".

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#806

Post by johndubchak »

jeffrallen wrote: post #656
chris72205 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never heard of this...but now I can only imagine how exciting this must have been as one of the engineers-- working on a top secret project for the CIA in an abandoned bowling alley: https://electricalstrategies.com/about/in-the-news/spies-in-... edit: whoops, looks like amatecha beat me to posting more info

Exciting, but not so ethical. We owe society to put our knowledge towards making it better for all people, not just "our team".

+1, couldn't agree more. I wish more nations/Governments would think like this, but too many are motivated by more wealth and power. At some point, you would think, the animal would satiate itself. It appears that is not the case.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#807

Post by dang »

MrEfficiency wrote: post #788
dang wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This breaks the site guideline that asks you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Please don't do that—it's a toxic trope that leads to dumber threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: looks like we've already warned you about this more than once. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you, so please don't post like this again. Ditto for unsubstantive comments in…

What evidence do you want? They only have 5 accounts with the ability to downvote. This is why comments always have -4 with anything critical of apple.

HN's software puts a floor of -4 on downvoted comments.

Please stop this now.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#808

Post by knikitin »

blackrock wrote: post #364

This reminds me of that old story about the Xerox copy machines that the Soviet Union bought. Where each unit was planted with a image recorder. And for years, the American spy agencies had a great laugh, that they were able to intercept all the documents that the Russians made a copy of. Back then, this was an off-network infiltration. Where the copied images, were retrieved during regular servicing intervals by a X…

I think Russia became much more aware of that kind of security threats. CPUs, motherboards etc are produced internally, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-2S%2B

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#809

Post by JohnHaugeland »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #58

> 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?

they're up front and open that they do

also, they're not that hard to dig out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eSAF_qT_FY

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#810

Post by jandrese »

acct1771 wrote: post #782
malandrew wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. This would be the modern equivalent of Air America and other schemes by the CIA to raise money to operate by involving themselves in illegal activity like the drug trade.

You're not suggesting the CIA is out of the drug business...are you?

Iran/Contra got the CIA into a lot of hot water with Congress. They had some pretty stringent restrictions put in place as a result.

https://www.csmonitor.com/1987/1113/aintel.html

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