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Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

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Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#71

Post by dragontamer »

danellis wrote: post #65
dragontamer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Those Bloomberg reporters showing pictures of lol capacitors did them no favors. We know the difference between processors and capacitors around here. ------- The picture in this article is actually plausible. It's not just a capacitor that is getting hyped up by ignorant reporters.

> We know the difference between processors and capacitors around here. Maybe for a two-legged device like a capacitor, but for something in, say, a SOT-23 package, you can't be sure what it is from the outside. Then again, maybe even something in a capacitor-like package could both communicate and be powered.

But Bloomberg didn't show an SOT-23 package. They showed something like an 0402 or maybe 0201 capacitor on the tip of a pencil.

Could China be hacking motherboards and then shipping them to the USA? Maybe. I'm certain that they're trying to figure out a plan at least. But the Bloomberg article was fully bunk and just FUD from the start.

And I think we all know how we'd hack Supermicro motherboards anyway: those BMCs are well known to be poorly updated, proprietary chips with full access to the keyboard / mouse / display of every single Supermicro motherboard ever made.

One would _assume_ that a Supermicro motherboard hack would involve a BMC attack, if it were to exist at all. If there's news that some hacker is using some other means than the "obvious" BMC, it'd be news, but you gotta be really, really technical and explain just how it works... so that you know, it'd be useful to IT departments to know how to defend against? (Ex: put BMC on its own VLAN at least)

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#72

Post by embedded_hiker »

hinkley wrote: post #51
noindiecred wrote: post #7

We will monitor pollution by (checks notes) dispersing a huge swarm of tiny robots, themselves made of heavy metals, that are infeasibly difficult to recover or recycle.

Someone is going to aspirate these things.

Including frogs and birds.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#73

Post by squarefoot »

snek_case wrote: post #33
SavantIdiot wrote: post #24

These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…

All you need to transmit data is one LED.

With the power available and in sunlight that would be impossible. I'd put a mini mirror behind a mini old-style b&w LCD screen and use the LCD to modulate reflections on the mirror, making it purely passive except for driving the LCD, which however would draw 3 orders of magnitude less power than a LED.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#74

Post by wyager »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #62
wyager wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High frequency = high power This isn’t true in any sense applicable to this discussion. For example a near-optical laser transmitter can be as or more efficient in joules per bit than an RF transmitter, depending on the situation.

> A near-optical laser transmitter Do you have to aim that laser transmitter?

Depends on the application, but if you do, it won’t pose a problem:

* you have more options than with RF (optics or phased array)

* you’ll get better angular precision at a given transmitter size

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#76

Post by joshuajill »

rthomas6 wrote: post #30
SavantIdiot wrote: post #24

These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…

Or just, you know, use a high frequency. There are tiny antennas. You can just power it via induction (like RFID) and you're set. It still couldn't transmit super far but I bet it would work.

6G communications is being prepared to use very high frequencies.

Also, plans are to use directed energy, not classical wave like RF.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6G_(network)

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#77

Post by joshuajill »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #46
rthomas6 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just, you know, use a high frequency. There are tiny antennas. You can just power it via induction (like RFID) and you're set. It still couldn't transmit super far but I bet it would work.

High frequency = high power. Energy harvesting is in the femptoWatt range.

"Frequencies from 100 GHz to 3 THz are promising bands for the next generation of wireless communication systems because of the wide swaths of unused and unexplored spectrum."

"Also, new results that give insights into power efficient beam steering algorithms".

From "Wireless Communications and Applications Above 100 GHz: Opportunities and Challenges for 6G and Beyond"

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#78

Post by mike_d »

dragontamer wrote: post #71
danellis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know the difference between processors and capacitors around here. Maybe for a two-legged device like a capacitor, but for something in, say, a SOT-23 package, you can't be sure what it is from the outside. Then again, maybe even something in a capacitor-like package could both communicate and be powered.

But Bloomberg didn't show an SOT-23 package. They showed something like an 0402 or maybe 0201 capacitor on the tip of a pencil. Could China be hacking motherboards and then shipping them to the USA? Maybe. I'm certain that they're trying to figure out a plan at least. But the Bloomberg article was fully bunk and just FUD from the start. And I think we all know how we'd hack Supermicro motherboards anyway: those BMCs…

It sounds like you are having difficulty drawing a distinction in your mind between the journalist who did the reporting on the story and the art department that had to come up with something that conveys "small chip" to an average reader without having actual photos.

Most stories about COVID include inaccurate artistic renditions of the virus, but that does not discredit the reporting.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#79

Post by zokier »

Before jumping to conclusions, note that the microcontroller equipped flyer is reported to be about 5cm in diameter. Not exactly size of sand grain.

From the article:

> Mechanical simulation results and photograph of a 3D IoT macroflier with a circuit to measure fine dust pollution through the light dosimetry method. The weight of the IoT flier is 19.7mg (d≈5cm), with payload 198mg (Supplementary Fig.23

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#80

Post by dragontamer »

mike_d wrote: post #78
dragontamer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Bloomberg didn't show an SOT-23 package. They showed something like an 0402 or maybe 0201 capacitor on the tip of a pencil. Could China be hacking motherboards and then shipping them to the USA? Maybe. I'm certain that they're trying to figure out a plan at least. But the Bloomberg article was fully bunk and just FUD from the start. And I think we all know how we'd hack Supermicro motherboards anyway: those BMCs…

It sounds like you are having difficulty drawing a distinction in your mind between the journalist who did the reporting on the story and the art department that had to come up with something that conveys "small chip" to an average reader without having actual photos. Most stories about COVID include inaccurate artistic renditions of the virus, but that does not discredit the reporting.

There's a big difference between a physical hardware attack (that is fully unspecified and fully FUD), and an actual threat to IT departments (ex: insecure BMC that needs to be isolated into its own VLAN).

The minute you start thinking about "how do I protect my company's computers from this attack?" is the minute the Bloomberg article falls apart. Asking for further details just resulted in Bloomberg clamming up and remaining silent on any additional details.

Bloomberg has had multiple years at this point to provide the details needed to be useful to IT departments everywhere about their purported attack. At some point, we just gotta assume that they were making things up.

-----

Lets say Bloomberg is correct about these hypothetical chips being placed into ill-specified motherboards. No attack is perfect: this is all computer equipment after all. It needs to be powered, it needs to have communications to the outside world, it needs to have spy-information (aka: taking information from the motherboard).

Its unlikely that a small chip with low-power could interface with high-speed components (ie: RAM, PCIe, Southbridge, SATA), it wouldn't have enough power. Etc. etc. Whatever the hypothetical attack is, there would be physical requirements it needs to satisfy.

All point back to the BMC: a low-bandwidth interface with huge amounts of information, with highly proprietary / likely insecure code running. So we think about how hardware could be used to hack this interface.

At which point, we immediately enter the realm of ridiculousness, because BMCs are CPUs in their own rights and simply run software to do their job. For a "zero-hardware" attack, China could just be rewriting BMC firmware or something way, way, waaaaay easier than what was described in the Bloomberg article.

Now China doesn't have to worry about replacing chips at all, and they still get all their spy-craft working.

------

But guess what? I think most IT departments are well aware of the proprietary and possibly insecure BMC interface. That's why there's a lot of discussions online about how to protect that interface.

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