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That claim about 99% of chips being manufactured in China is very easy to verify as being utterly false. I have to wonder about the trustworthiness of the rest.
The fact that he's pleading for money as he makes these claims makes me suspicious of them. He needs to provide more specific information and evidence.
[pdf] http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...
I'm less curious about whether overseas silicon is backdoored than I am in how exposed the attack/activation surface for those backdoors are.
- Assumes the Chinese put the backdoor in. There are plenty of others interested in backdoors. - Assumes the designing company doesn't do any detailed production product checks. Not likely since this is a many, many billion dollar business. - Claims a systemic problem but only notes one chip. That one FPGA could just have a design flaw. Need more details on the others. - At the end it claims an investigation over ten years but the fab world has greatly changed over ten years. Many micro controller companies actually own their Chinese fabs now.
As a side note, if you discover something like this, don't assume you found something you weren't meant to find. You're discovery may just have made you found.
The language used in this article seems very much like the author has something to sell and is trying to create the impression that it is advanced and mysterious. The claims about improvements of many orders of magnitude in speed and cost as well as the unavailability of information and services to private individuals suggest to me that someone is trying to get a defense contract for some overhyped technology that wo…
Are there backdoors in silicon? Of course there are backdoors in silicon. Just like in software, most of them will be deniably accidental. It's unlikely we'll be able to trace most of them to deliberate sabotage, but the net effect will be the same.
Having set the stage, consider: the competency required to manually evaluate silicon packages is extraordinarily rare. Even if you wanted to shell out 6 figures for a competent superficial evaluation, you'd have a lot of trouble finding available Chris Tarnovskys to do the work.
If you have 50% of the competence of Tarnovsky and the ability to automate any significant portion of that work, you can probably write your own ticket.
So: what's the likelihood that any such person, with an actual affiliation to a respected EE/CS security program, would just be making stuff up?
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/SG_talk_BA.pdf
I'm skeptical. There are too many unsupported claims in this article. Off the top of my head: - Assumes the Chinese put the backdoor in. There are plenty of others interested in backdoors. - Assumes the designing company doesn't do any detailed production product checks. Not likely since this is a many, many billion dollar business. - Claims a systemic problem but only notes one chip. That one FPGA could just have a…
Whether any of those backdoors are deliberate is much less relevant than whether they're known to your adversaries. In the case of Chinese electronics engineering, your adversaries have the blueprints.
Do you really think it's likely that designers of bespoke silicon reliably decap, image, and analyze the finished products? I think you're attributing Intel/AMD-level wherewithal when, just like in software, a huge chunk of the market has nothing resembling the resources of the leading vendors.
The Cambridge Security Lab is not fucking around. Assume this is not hype. I'm less curious about whether overseas silicon is backdoored than I am in how exposed the attack/activation surface for those backdoors are.
"Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip" - er, what? So either they have some approach for turning silicon into a machine readable form, in which case "code breaking" makes no sense, or they're attacking the chip via its interfaces. Why mention both? Because "advanced code breaking" sounds cool.
"In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems" - advanced Stuxnet weapon? This is blatant namedropping, Stuxnet is irrelevant here being a piece of software.
"The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure." - "this is a general purpose chip that happens to be used in military applications".
"adaptable - scale up to include many types of chip" - implies there are complexity limits, so likely they've applied their process to some relatively simple piece of silicon, again suggesting some boring chip.
"found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract." - hardly uncommon, in fact the Intel CPU I'm typing this on has such a feature - for encrypted microcode updates.
Until there are more details, this vague news article is just dressing.