U.S. and U.K. F-35 Jets Include 'Core' Circuit Boards from Chinese-Owned Company

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/15/chinese-owned-company-supplies-electronics-on-u-s-and-u-k-f-35-fighter-jets/#f144b3c25c05

by protomyth • 7 years ago

143 102 7 years ago

forbes.com

ajross3• 7 years ago

It's a PCB manufacturer.

They aren't buying computers from china. The company that did design the electronics (GE) decided to have this little outfit manufacture the PCBs for them (I mean, we're talking a production run in the low thousands so far -- this is NOT a big project). And the little outfit got bought by a bigger PCB company in China a few years back.

The risk to the supply chain is zero -- anyone can make printed circuit boards. The intelligence risk is limited to the ability to see how chips are wired together, with some ability to guess what ICs are in use by clues in the pinouts.

DoofusOfDeath• 7 years ago

Couldn't a good state-run sabotage take advantage of assumptions about how much scrutiny/inspection is needed for a given component?

For example, suppose there was some little-known chemistry that would make a PCB likely to fail $X years after manufacture. Or bonus points if it had out-gassing that made other, innocent parts have high failure rates?

cheerlessbog• 7 years ago

Any malicious intervention would as you say have to be very subtle to pass system tests. Given they cannot know whether and when the planes would ever be used against them, it would be playing the long game at best.

monocasa2• 7 years ago

Given that it's a fighterjet board, it's probably just a glorified FPGA breakout board.

ajross3• 7 years ago

That's for new-manufactured boards. My guess is this whole run completed years ago. And surely new boards will be farmed out to some other Mom & Pop PCB shop. These companies are everywhere, electronics assembly is not meaningfully "high tech" any more.

robin_reala• 7 years ago

I guess Bloomberg might have something to say about PCBs not being a security risk. Did they ever back up that story in any way?

dmoy• 7 years ago

If they were made after the Chinese purchase, maybe. There's no indication in the article that they were though.

analognoise• 7 years ago

Except that in the US defense industry, anyone working for a foreign company is to be regarded as a foreign national (even if they have a subsidiary that is in the US).

While a part of me agrees, I don't want the Chinese to have access to even non-critical things. What if they insert some kind of small component that can be embedded in a PCB stackup that siphons data from a bus, or introduce a high Q resonator that creates an easily discoverable signature when hit with a certain frequency, or something else (like The Thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)?

x-ray inspection at the bare-board level would check for both of those things (of course), but usually x-ray inspection is done by the assembler after boards are populated - not before - and I've never heard of it being one on a bare-board as an inspection step post receipt. So something like this actually could be missed.

You wouldn't even need to do it to every board, you could do it to some fraction of them, and have (essentially) a secret frequency vulnerability lying in wait. Basically it would invalidate your stealth/LO (obviously this is dependent on shielding and a lot of other things, but you get the idea).

heavenlyblue• 7 years ago

Pretty sure it’s quite easy to test for any resonators in a radio test chamber.

diydsp• 7 years ago

The intelligence risk is limited to the ability to see how chips are wired together, with some ability to guess what ICs are in use by clues in the pinouts.

No, they could insert fake chips during the assembly. Chips that do almost anything, from interfere with operation to logging information, to transmitting data, to exploding in place.

sailingparrot• 7 years ago

They only build the board, not the chips that go on it, so no, they couldn't.

seabird• 7 years ago

This is all assuming that they did the assembly, which I'm willing to wager they didn't.

MaikuMori• 7 years ago

It's bare board, they don't assemble. They just make the PCB board itself.

chrisseaton2• 7 years ago

I don't know anything about intercepting electronics, but I would not bet my life (which is what you're doing) that a good signals intelligence agency cannot somehow compromise a PCB.

jackfoxy• 7 years ago

Never underestimate motivated spooks with unlimited budget and access to the best and brightest.

vidarh2• 7 years ago

I agree. I mean if we're guessing at possible dangers, it seems like there are several possible angles that might be tempting to try:

- It's meant to be a stealthy plane, how about tweaking the board to cause a nice and noisy signal leak in certain circumstances?

- find a way of causing the board to fail under suitable circumstances.

- Probably less plausible, if they can figure out what data is passing through the board, then there is potential to engineer side-channels in the hope that they can achieve another compromise that can leverage it. Maybe they never get the chance to take advantage, maybe they do. Or if e.g. they can find an input that an adversary can potentially influence by how they engage with the plane, use that to trigger failure as above.

I'm assuming they're properly inspected and tested on receipt, but wires on circuit boards can interfere with each other in messy ways if you exceed tolerances even a little bit. I recall an amusing case some years back where someone used genetic algorithms to lay out features on an FPGA and got a very good solution that was totally un-reproducible: it turned out their GA had optimized to take advantage of quirks of that one specific FPGA that didn't work on other FPGA's of the same model, by combining things in ways it hadn't been designed for. It seems it's very much possible to design chips that superficially looks like it should act one way but where it acts differently in certainly circumstances.

Doing so in a way that's exploitable without being caught out is probably much harder, but I share your skepticism.

LifeLiverTransp• 7 years ago

Reminds me of that article about the embassy bug that was posted here last week - in theory you could design a passive signal amplifier into the pcb, which only lights up when beeing iluminated at a key frequency. Doesent even have to be energy supplied or otherwise active.

H8crilA• 7 years ago

I believe this is possible. Discussed in detail with a proof-of-concept exploit at the latest CCC:

https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9597-modchips_of_the_state#t=901

Edit: this is a slightly different attack, it replaces a resistor with a custom chip that alters the transmission on that line (carefully disconnects the line, turning some 1s into 0s). But it should be possible to fit something like that inside a PCB, when the layers are put together.

quickben2• 7 years ago

The risk to the supply chain is zero

Hypothetically, what would happen to a pcb board , 33x33cm in size, with the ground lines running around the edge of that board, when hit with a high power 900 MHz broadcast?

ryanmarsh• 7 years ago

“Hypothetically speaking”. Heh. Good one.

On that note I don’t understand the willful cognitive dissonance around Chinese espionage. They’re a powerful state aggressively looking out for their own self interests just like all the others.

mysterydip2• 7 years ago

Aircraft go through many tests, including various electromagnetic interference tests. They should know exactly how it responds in such a scenario.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-461

pps43• 7 years ago

That high power 900 MHz broadcast will travel half an inch, then get absorbed by the metal housing. Military electronics are shielded, both to protect them from EMP and to avoid detection by passive radar.

jorblumesea3• 7 years ago

What? This is exactly where an intelligence agency would step in and add an extra little chip onto the board. There's tons of precedence for this.

Unless the government inspected every board individually, there's no way to guarantee supply chain. At least from a national defense perspective, everything that comes out of China is a possible risk.

To flip the debate around, if the US manufactured PCBs for China, don't you think we would do the same thing?

MrMorden• 7 years ago

An extra chip on a bare board would stand out quite a bit.

alexnewman2• 7 years ago

I thought this was hard for complicated VIAs

lstodd• 7 years ago

It's no problem - just buy a bigger PCB machine produced in China.

one2know2• 7 years ago

From the accusations of China compromising motherboards a few months ago, the exploits are: Incorporating transmitters that look like surface mount components. Imagine putting a small transmitter into the design on a signal trace where a resistor or capacitor normally would go and then setting up a receiver just outside a base to catch the signal. It could record all kinds of things and transmit it a short distance, weapons loadout, fuel amount, when the aircraft leaves the base, etc. The second is that some components can be squished between PCB layers such that the only way to detect them is through xray inspection.

And for you security deniers that say nothing like this ever happens, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

gmueckl• 7 years ago

For transmitters, sure, that might work with a lot of caveats attached. For example, you need to repurpose wires on the PCB to act as antennas and then hope that the shielding around the elctronics will be transparent enough to pick anything up.

But getting the information to be transmitted is a lot harder. I don't know what kind of component this is, but I suspect that not a lot of PCBs have direct access to that kind of high level information (assuming that there is a kind of system bus that even passes such data around...).

johnwalkr• 7 years ago

It is a big project in terms of people, and it's not impossible that bill of materials was referenced at some point. Even if not, the netlist which must surely have been provided for testing purposes must provide many clues (unrealistic example: AVR8_RX). Even if "only" PCB manufacture was done, there's a lot of information, on par (better, in fact!) with xraying the assembled product.

dboreham• 7 years ago

Last time I worked on PCB design and manufacture liaison this isn't the way it's done. You send artwork (in electronic form) to the sub. They perform a connectivity test on the finished boards but the net list they test against was derived by their CAM system from the artwork data. We never released our CAD netlist data to them and honestly I don't think they'd know what to do with it if we had. Ymmv since this is an old data point.

deepnotderp• 7 years ago

I don't think anyone who knows what they're talking about is worrying about supply chain risk, what they're worried about is backdoor risk. Controlling pcb manufacturing is a good way to be able to put all sorts of surveillance chips, backdoor chips, etc. on the pcbs.

baybal22• 7 years ago

The risk to the supply chain is zero -- anyone can make printed circuit boards. The intelligence risk is limited to the ability to see how chips are wired together, with some ability to guess what ICs are in use by clues in the pinouts.

Raytheon once ran into a "small" problem with it. They actually did whole PCBA in China for AIM 9L.

There is a blogger guy who actually found a whole image processing board with top tier FPGAs that somehow got to an electronics scrap trader around here few years ago.

brokenmachine2• 7 years ago

I would like to read that if you can find the link.

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

Its just hilarious example of how China is part of the global economy despite Trumps escalating tweets (trade deficit continues to climb by the way if anyone's interested).

I am sure China knows everything about the F-35 its not a secret weapon.

oceanghost2• 7 years ago

Does this feel like propaganda to anyone else?

marak830• 7 years ago

Yes, but then again I personally view a hell of a lot lately as propaganda. Which most is. Whether it's actually factual or click-bait is a whole 'nother story.

Edit: fat thumb typos

noir_lord• 7 years ago

The weird thing with propaganda is that it can often be completely true in each part but represent a lie in totality.

You run ten completely truthful stories about X doing something but no stories about Y doing the same thing.

The perception then becomes skewed towards Y.

Is manufacturing a PCB in China for a critical piece of defense equipment a security risk, possibly, it's also a possibility the same is true if they made that PCB in France or Israel or Japan (though I'm sure the threat curve is different).

The other questions I'm curious about are things like, ignoring the F-35, how much other equipment in service is dependent on Chinese manufacturers - electronics are everywhere and China is the nations factory (of sub-assemblies at least).

darkpuma• 7 years ago

"The weird thing with propaganda is that it can often be completely true in each part but represent a lie in totality."

Propaganda can also straight up tell the truth. Propaganda, contrary to the impression given to many put through the public school system, is not a synonym for "lie". Propaganda is often lies, but being dishonest is not a defining characteristic of propaganda.

One famous example: Loose lips sink ships. Okay, maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but it's generally pretty true. In a war, breaches in secrecy can easily cost lives. Those loose lips posters were still unambiguously propaganda though.

oceanghost2• 7 years ago

"In the kingdom of lies, the truth is treason."

jm4• 7 years ago

It’s just a random guy with a blog. This isn’t Forbes reporting. It’s a contributor site. You pay to become a contributor and you can post whatever you want. There’s no fact checking here. No investigative reporting. This is literally just a blog and designed to look like a legitimate news story from Forbes. Frankly, I think, for that reason, Forbes contributor sites should be banned here.

mfer• 7 years ago

1) malicious actors get information from multiple sources and combine them. We talk about this with data sets that are leaked. I wonder what that means for things like this and China as a state actor

2) contractors on military projects are highly regulated. I wonder if any laws or contractual agreements were broken by this

benj111• 7 years ago

As far as I was aware, the UK didn't have access to the source code for it's own jets anyway. Does it make much difference if yet another nation adds it's own backdoors?

https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2009/11/us-to-keep-jca-source...

canada_dry2• 7 years ago

Let's turn around the discussion... if Russia had decided to outsource the PCB's for some new stealth fighter to a US manufacturer you can bet that several cloak-and-dagger US agencies would be looking for any way possible to compromise and take advantage of the opportunity.

wrong_variable• 7 years ago

So lets be as paranoid as North Korea ? national self-sufficiency ? every country that tried it went bankrupt.

chillacy• 7 years ago

At least for military stuff, not consumer. ITAR is a thing still.

burfog2• 7 years ago

If there is any country in the world that can make national self-sufficiency work, it's the USA. The economy is still the largest, and it is also the most diverse. The USA has a large and varied geography from which to generate materials. The population is large.

China is far less capable, and nobody else is even close to being able to reach national self-sufficiency without going back to a very primitive meager existence.

ajross3• 7 years ago

Maybe, but their hands would be tied by the fact that a PCB isn't a very effective way to do that kind of espionage.

I'm not saying there's no possible conflict of interest here or that China wouldn't try something or that we should continue to use Shenzhen Fastprint for circuit boards to go in our super premium fancy stealth doodads.

I'm saying this is stupid and a non-issue and people should calm down.

ei8htyfi5e• 7 years ago

I think you're not thinking big enough. If you have experience in the intel community, then by all means, please keep posting, but from my experience, the capabilities of the intel communities will make you chuckle to yourself with some of the ingenious methods they use. This isn't 'stupid and a non-issue' and people should rightfully question the supply chain on this one.

canada_dry2• 7 years ago

isn't a very effective way to do that kind of espionage

If you know very little about someone, just examining their laundry will tell you quite a bit about them. So 'effective' is really relative.

And, I'd argue that just having their hands on a physical component gives them the ability to introduce purposeful exotic flaws which they can exploit, or just ensure failure sometime in the future yet aren't detectable by standard quality control methods. Kinda like 'zero-day' code flaws that are kept in ones back pocket until needed.

microcolonel3• 7 years ago

Sure, it may not be as helpful as manufacturing the ICs, but planting ICs in assembled PCBs is actually pretty straightforward, the way I see it. The marginal cost advantage, if any, of manufacturing the board with this company, is probably offset by the cost of verifying to satisfaction that there are no unwanted ICs embedded in the PCB.

tehjoker2• 7 years ago

I understand in the abstract why the US is freaking out about China as their economy is eclipsing the US and they are starting to create a competing international order to the WTO/IMF type deal with the belt and road initiative. However, I don't understand exactly what is triggering the national security establishment's (usually stupid and deadly) sudden paranoia about China.

Many people I know simply see these headlines and start to see China as an official enemy. I don't understand why we should see them that way at all. The official enemies of the US are typically brutalized in various ways and slandered in the media. It is difficult to know what is to be taken at face value.

MaupitiBlue2• 7 years ago

Have you looked at your firewall’s logs in the last 15 years?

izacus• 7 years ago

Are you prepared to send your children to die in a war over those logs? Both World Wars were caused by such mercantilistic tensions and they were economically ruinous for primary participants.

Why are you in such a hurry to escalate to war and send off Americans to die? Do you think you can really walk off with an economic advantage after war with a nation of 1 billion?

evoloution• 7 years ago

Thucydides's trap, old as history itself. From the wikipedia page of the Graham T. Allison who termed the coin: Allison coined the phrase Thucydides's Trap to refer to the situation that when a rising power causes fear in an established power, it escalates toward war. Thucydides wrote: "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." And a Ted talk from him explaining the matter: https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_allison_is_war_between_chin...

teknologist• 7 years ago

Well there's certainly more in play here than plain "paranoia". Abuse of WTO rules, foul play on the internet (particularly pertaining to BGP hijacking and DDoS attacks), spying, concentration camps in Xinjiang, etc.

sidlls2• 7 years ago

Trump and our right-wing government is helping speed things along, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they're eclipsing the US. It's more like we're fumbling the ball.

Moreover, China's economy is heavily dependent on the consumption of the goods they manufacture for other countries. As their own population demands better wages and living conditions they've been outsourcing basic manufacturing to places like Africa. They haven't got a good foundation to develop the systems, intellectual properties, research, and other things necessary to move beyond manufacturing. Things may be changing, but the sort of cultural change required for that effort is huge. Even with Trump's substantial effort to tear down the US as a world power it is not likely China will rise to even nearly the same level of dominance any time soon (decades out, if ever).

jorblumesea3• 7 years ago

I think the concern is that a nation that has literal concentration camps and exhibits any-western thought and agendas is going to become a major power.

China is hardly going to "eclipse" the US. I think the concern is less economic and more geopolitical. It should worry the West that a highly authoritarian nation is becoming wealthy and powerful.

It's a reasonable concern, I think. Once China gets hard geopolitical power it will start to export its own way of thinking, just as the US did. But unlike the US, which at least in theory believes in basic rights, China is a literal authoritarian surveillance state with no such values.

I worry that state run concentration camps like those in xinjiang will become normalized.

tehjoker2• 7 years ago

Yea, China definitely has problems no question about that. Xinjiang is one of the points I am most concerned with. However, the US doesn't take actions based on anything resembling goodwill towards others (we have a network of torture stations and kidnapping black sites don't forget). In many important ways, the US can be described as highly authoritarian, particularly when it comes to foreign policy (witness combinations of illegal invasions, brutal sanctions, and sometimes decisive support for death squads in Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq, Guatemala, etc).

I do think the world should bring more attention to Xinjing, but I don't think escalating tensions is going to do anything worthwhile (especially when I haven't heard a whit about the trade war being sanctions for humanitarian violations). The trade war is also not going to help American workers, capital controls would do that though.

westiseast2• 7 years ago

Personally I think it’s not a ‘sudden’ paranoia, it’s an overdue one.

China has made it abundantly clear for a long time that it considers the US to be an ideological enemy, a military rival and a target for economic and geopolitical warfare.

Since ~2008 / Xi Jin Ping took over, its also been fairly clear that China has no intention of liberalizing in any sense, and the government is actively working to undermine the US/European model of a harmonious world.

However, US government policy pre-Trump basically assumed that China was going to liberalize and play by the (US/EU) rules.

I’m not a Trump fan by any means, but regarding China I think he is the first to drop the pretense that China is a friend of America, and now the China hawks in the media, government and military are all piling on.

majia3• 7 years ago

China has made it abundantly clear for a long time that it considers the US to be an ideological enemy, a military rival and a target for economic and geopolitical warfare.

Not true. China is only interested in preserving its own authoritarian system. China feels fine to coexist with other forms of government, democracy or monarchy. It may influence other countries to advance its business interest, but never attempt to overthrow a government for ideological reasons. What you said only shows the US considers China an ideological enemy, but not the reverse.

microcolonel3• 7 years ago

I understand in the abstract why the US is freaking out about China as their economy is eclipsing the US and they are starting to create a competing international order to the WTO/IMF type deal with the belt and road initiative. However, I don't understand exactly what is triggering the national security establishment's (usually stupid and deadly) sudden paranoia about China.

The previous administrations were directly collaborating with China, which was justified to the public with the wishful thinking that the CCP would liberalize when exposed to the productive free market. This administration doesn't have the same ties with the Chinese state that the previous ones did, and at the same time China is becoming visibly less liberal and more tyrannical. It's not paranoia if you know anything about the CCP.

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

China wants the seat at the table back and reinstate themselves as a world power. Unlike the USSR they have the economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to be an equal to the current players. Accommodate or resist. The US seems to steer to the latter.

toyg• 7 years ago

Unlike the USSR

The USSR did match or surpass everyone else for a while. You can argue about long-term sustainability, but from 1945 to 1975 ca. they were a legitimate superpower by all definitions.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

If I were China I would take steps to ensure the boards degrade after some years. That would ensure they pass inspection and get installed. Then the parts can start falling off.

SudoEpoch• 7 years ago

I've read several articles on this issue. It doesnt appear they are even doing the pick and place. They are just manufacturing the PCB. My opinion is it's a non issue that some politics have arisen.

galangalalgol• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it still be possible to guess a lot about the design and find potentially exploitable mistakes? Or to build defects into the traces so that they fail in use due to vibration, temperature, or poor mutual inductance? Transmitters do seem far too difficult to get working in a shielded environment and prone to discovery.

jrjrjrjr• 7 years ago

I wouldn't trust their ability to monitor and properly neutralize the etch back.

All Chinese plating is crap, always rushed through rinse and usually contains residuals.

Can't believe no one mentioned this, a ticking time bomb for corrosion and failure.

crististm• 7 years ago

Leaving all the real espionage possibilities aside, I wonder if this is not a modern day propaganda machine doing its job.

banku_brougham• 7 years ago

Reminds me of Battlestar Galactica first episode, except with terrestrial jets instead of battlestars and vipers.

myrandomcomment• 7 years ago

One instance of a single part of any device being tampered with by the Chinese government would be enough to cause every western company to move all production out of China.

U.S. and U.K. F-35 Jets Include 'Core' Circuit Boards from Chinese-Owned Company

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