Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#Assurance

by turnersr • 14 years ago

536 149 14 years ago

cl.cam.ac.uk

Lednakashim2• 14 years ago

Can somebody explain exactly what they got access to? What is encrypted?

waiwai933• 14 years ago

"This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key."

From this, I'd say that anyone who used the backdoor would basically be able to take over the chip completely. Which is somewhat scary, considering the author says it's used in weapons systems—hopefully the author's informed an intelligence agency with the specifics.

plainOldText• 14 years ago

Taken from text: "This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems."

toemetoch2• 14 years ago

This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems.

From the description I'm guessing an interface device that does something in the order of I2C/CAN/M on one end and external comms to the outside world on the other (why else would require "sophisticated encryption standard").

Lednakashim2• 14 years ago

Isn't it an FPGA chip?

JL20102• 14 years ago

I'm going to put my speculation hat on here. Others here have mentioned that the chip in question is an Actel FPGA.

First, we must understand what these are used in: embedded systems. Typically, at the heart of most embedded systems you have two possibilities: a microcontroller or microprocessor, or an FPGA. The microcomputers run some kind of firmware (instruction set fed to a processor architecture) which is completely different then an FPGA which are actually re-configurable transistor arrays to implement fixed digital logic. This transistor configuration is typically loaded from EEPROM on power up - so it is stored/uploaded by a user somewhere after they've done some work in their CAD tool.

In either case, whether it be firmware written for a microprocessor based system, or the "firmware" for an FPGA (I forget what that logic routing configuration format is called - technically not firmware since it's not instructions) it is likely that whoever wrote it would want to protect it from being read or protect their device from having another firmware loaded on. There are many schemes to do so, it is possible that this is what has been compromised.

cnvogel• 14 years ago

They have procured programmable logic chips (FPGA) with the feature that the configuration data that defines the function on powerup can be encrypted/signed.

The configuration is commonly stored in a small serial eeprom (tiny 8-pin chip) and automatically read when the FPGA powers up. The content of this chip is often called "bitstream", this configuration eeprom/flash is sometimes also internal to the FPGA.

The key this configuration is encrypted with is supposed to be stored securely inside the FPGA, but they managed to extract it using undocumented commands on the "debug port" (JTAG) that the vendor explicitly claimed did not exist.

Note: This is an interface that normally is not easily accessible from the outside, but sometimes connected to a microcontroller to update the FPGA configuration.

Theoretically someone who gets access ("normal" computer backdoor over the network) to such a device might be able to re-program the chip thereby causing malfunction or add a flaw deliberately. The second scenario would be to decrypt the configuration information, "decompile" it and learn about secret algorithms or functions.

notspanishflu• 14 years ago

Inquiry Into Counterfeit Electronic Parts in the DoD Supply Chain (PDF).

http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...

gdubs• 14 years ago

I've been wondering about this for a while. Given the scale of chip architecture today, does anyone in the field have any input as to how hard something like this is to detect?

Estragon4• 14 years ago

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.

toemetoch2• 14 years ago

Last week a report was released that revealed 1800 cases during a 1-year survey. [pdf] This is just one device, he has good reasons to advertise his expertise.

[pdf] http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...

Estragon4• 14 years ago

1800 cases of counterfeit parts, not 1800 cases of maliciously designed parts. There could well be malice involved, but the vast majority of those cases were almost certainly economically motivated.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

He's an academic in England. Of course he's going to try to monetise his research.

Estragon4• 14 years ago

That doesn't make it any less suspect.

cantankerous4• 14 years ago

I think he works in a domain where a lot of these things are accepted by his colleagues as fact. Judging by the way this website is laid out, the general public is not his audience.

mvip• 14 years ago

So China is doing the same thing to hardware that the U.S. is doing to software (and probably hardware too). Well, not really shocking. Karma is a bitch. :)

Zak2• 14 years ago

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 won't really deliver what's promised.

Edit: they seem to have submitted a patent application for the process of sending test signals to a chip and monitoring it with an oscilloscope: http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Integrated-circuit-inv...

tptacek10• 14 years ago

Backdoors --- intentional, accidental, or (most typically) "deniably" accidental --- are extremely common in software of all kinds, from RTOS kernels to web stacks to third-party database wrapper libraries.

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?

Zak2• 14 years ago

I'm only going based on the tone of the writing and the content of the patent application; both are written like hype. He might actually be doing something novel, or he might just be trying to get attention for his company and not doing anything special relative to others in the field. There may be good reasons to avoid talking about details in his field, but when someone selling something does that, hype is a reasonable default explanation.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

To paraphrase Fight Club:

"Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We boot your servers, we back up your drives, we write your applications, we maintain your kernels. We guard your data. Do not... fuck with us. "

Could secure hardware be bootstrapped? Could we use the embarrassment of riches we have in terms of number of transistors available to implement arrays of small and fast processors which can emulate security hardware and be programmed using formal verification? This way, we could concentrate all of our scrutiny on one unit, and change much of the hardware problem into a software one. It wouldn't be as fast or as cheap, but it might be fast enough and workably secure.

kryptiskt• 14 years ago

"Currently there is no economical or timely way of ascertaining if a manufacturer's specifications have been altered during the manufacturing process (99% of chips are manufactured in China),"

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.

tobiasu• 14 years ago

To add, silicon can, and obviously is inspected by manufacturer using optical and electronic microscopes. There are companies specialized in reverse engineering chips or verifying existing components. Even hobbyists can grind down chips and figure out what the circuitry does, using nothing more than good optics and a digital camera plus freely available software to stitch the images together and start analyzing traces from the picture.

Sure, this stuff gets harder with modern technology, but it would be ridiculous to assume that manufacturers blindly click together chips and hope for the best because they can't inspect their work.

lumberjack• 14 years ago

I've seem to recall something regarding this. The manufacturer has the exact blueprints to help guide them. Reverse engineers can't rely on the blueprints because they might be comprised.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

Is there any way to mangle it to being true? I don't think so.

Maybe 99% of volume, but not type, is produced in China.

Or 99% of types are made in China, but with volume elsewhere.

Maybe 99% of this particular IC family are made in China, with the rest being made elsewhere is something that works.

Havoc• 14 years ago

I'm sure places like Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc make more than 1%, regardless of type vs volume.

The 99% does strike me as something that was thumbsucked.

tptacek10• 14 years ago

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.

forgotusername• 14 years ago

Aside from this not being a very useful comment, I think there's good cause to assume this may be a little dressed up:

"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.

saulrh• 14 years ago

If I had to guess, he's being funded by the military and he is definitely fishing for money. I've seen the same kind of language before. On the other hand, as the parent comment said, these researchers are reputable and we should assume that they've actually found something. This report was just written for a different audience (generals, not engineers).

tptacek10• 14 years ago

I assume most people on HN don't follow security and might not be familiar with the University of Cambridge's security program.

Having said that, I take issue with almost every point you made:

* Both Chris Tarnovsky and Karsten Nohl have, supported so far as I know by none of the resources of a major university, given security conference talks on processes for "Turning silicon into machine-readable form". Nohl actually has an open source package to help do it. There's nothing incredible about that claim.

* I'm not sure I follow how the most famous act of computer-aided industrial espionage isn't germane to hardware backdoors. Researchers put their work into context so people outside the field will take it seriously.

* The military uses Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux, too, both of which are general-purpose packages. You think a universally distributed backdoor in either that had escaped detection until 2012 wouldn't be relevant to national security?

* Go read Tarnovsky's blog, where he has blogged about extracting keys from silicon.

The only point you've made here that I agree with is that the attack/activation surface of these illicit features is likely to be more important than anything else.

raphman2• 14 years ago

I would assume that the most likely attack would be for a country to buy weapons containing this chip and reading out the firmware using the backdoor.

jsprinkles3• 14 years ago

I'm respectful of your qualifications, but annoyed when you use your credentials without qualification. A paranoid man might assume your comments are strategically placed to benefit parties you're aligned with, based on how little context there is here; I know better, others might not.

"These are good guys. This paper is the real deal."

I appreciate what you bring to HN, but that this is the top comment worries me, particularly when it comes to security of all things. There's valuable comments that are contrary to your opinion surrounding you, and I wish you'd explain your side a bit more clearly in cases like this.

tptacek10• 14 years ago

You caught me. I'm a secret shill for Ross Anderson.

rdl• 14 years ago

There's really no debate that Cambridge has probably the top university hardware security analysis program in the world. They published attacks on the IBM 4758 Security Coprocessor, a bunch of attacks on specific smartcards, and are basically the standard bearer for (non classified) research into this kind of stuff. I think some of the chip companies (Intel, IBM) might have better resources for pure silicon debugging, but less security clue to go with it.

16s• 14 years ago

Cisco has been fighting with the Chinese over imitation network gear (branded as Cisco) for years. So rest assured that the switches are all backed-doored too. It's a big problem. Really, tribes out to forge their weapons at home.

laughinghan4• 14 years ago

"Currently there is no economical or timely way of ascertaining if a manufacturer's specifications have been altered during the manufacturing process (99% of chips are manufactured in China),"

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.

- kryptiskt, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4030818

It has actually not been "very easy" for me to verify this, but I did find something saying that in 2009, China had 9% of the world's production capacity, which makes me strongly doubt that they are now 99% of the actual manufacturing amount: http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0212/semiconductors...

@tptacek: Care to provide references for why Cambridge Security Lab is as big a deal as you're making them out to be, and why we should overlook this blatantly exaggerated fact they cited?

coopdog2• 14 years ago

Does Taiwan count as part of China? A brief look at the Taiwan-China relationship shows it's a more difficult question than it initially seems

tptacek10• 14 years ago

A hardware security researcher's inability to perform Gartner-correct market research is not relevant to his/her ability to decap, image, and analyze silicon, and thus not at all relevant to me. Wow do I ever not care about this particular gotcha.

alecmuffett• 14 years ago

@laughinghan if you have to ask my suspicion is that no word of mouth will be enough for you, so instead may I recommend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_J._Anderson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Kuhn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Murdoch

...and http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ ; I am unaffiliated with Cambridge other than knowing a few of the people there.

gaius• 14 years ago

It's funny reading people's replies. If it had been from MIT or Stanford, they'd have accepted it without question. I don't think many Americans are really aware of universities outside of the US.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

Hardware trust is something I've been wondering about for a while now. It's easy to hide a software bug. (As evidenced by the occasional blue moon story about somebody stumbling over one.) But a hardware bug just seems like a constant paranoia that can never be investigated without expensive tooling.

cantankerous4• 14 years ago

There's a bit of research going into this area right now. Verification strategies for hardware, etc. Another way around it is to bump up your integration of trusted FPGA platforms where you can write and use your own hardware in a potentially more trustworthy way.

mattbauer• 14 years ago

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 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.

tptacek10• 14 years ago

Many (maybe most? I don't specialize here) backdoors are deniably accidental, a term I'm coining here to mean "could be sabotage, could be a development artifact".

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.

Create3• 14 years ago

If it is from Actel, then it is CMMI certified :)

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/SG_talk_BA.pdf

regularfry2• 14 years ago

Yeah, there's enough info on the scan to figure out the part family.

Create3• 14 years ago

...its more fun than reading the keys (CB21 5DQ) from FLASH:

Helion Technology Limited -- Helion Technology.

breck• 14 years ago

It is trivial for manufacturers to sneak backdoors into chips. It is improbable to keep backdoors a secret. People aren't good at keeping secrets.

po• 14 years ago

So, 100% of the backdoors I've ever heard about were not kept secret, therefore backdoors are unlikely to be kept secret. :-)

raphman2• 14 years ago

The chip in question seems to be an Actel Microsemi ProASIC3 (PA3) [1,2], given the hints in the screenshot of the paper.

[1] http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/ [2] http://www.actel.com/documents/pa3_faq.html

(I guess there is no real advantage in keeping this obscured)

femto• 14 years ago

Ouch, as it would be quite easy to think that you are "safe" if you spin your own processor from scratch and run it on an FPGA.

Who's to say that manufacturing in China means the backdoor was injected by China? I would have thought the US is just as likely a source, given that the design came from there. Surely the US government would love having access to FPGAs in foreign systems?

The cynic in me says that Cambridge needs to keep poking, as they might find two backdoors: one inserted by the US, the other by China.

dhx• 14 years ago

I see no mention of tamper-resistance/self-destruct features?

Power glitch detection, mechanisms to detect decapping/stripping, wire mesh shielding, protection against ultra-violet laser stimulation of transistors, ... are all important.

For those interested in further reading, Security Engineering[1] by Ross Anderson contains a section on chip security. Another paper[2] by Ross Anderson and Markus Kuhn (1996) provides additional background.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tamper.html

JL20102• 14 years ago

"Unlike SRAM-based FPGAs or conventional ASIC solutions, ProASIC3/E devices offer one of the highest levels of design security in the industry. In fact, ProASIC3/E devices bring new levels of security to the FPGA market place. An FPGA industry first, secure ISP is performed using the industry-standard 128- bit AES block cipher algorithm. Reprogramming can be securely performed in-system to support future design iterations and field upgrades with peace of mind that valuable IP cannot be compromised or copied." ISP stands for in-system-programming

__alexs• 14 years ago

They do a special "military" version for which they don't publicly publish the featureset.

Nrsolis• 14 years ago

Is there ANY chance that this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot?

I can envision a scenario where this "backdoor" is actually part of the designed-in security features of the chip designed to prevent an unauthorized party from reading out the FPGA "programming" as it were. As such, it's conceivable that there might be multiple keys or even a series of "transport" or "default" keys that are similar to those found on ISO smartcards. What we might be looking at is a "feature" as opposed to a "backdoor."

In any case, this sort of thing only becomes a critical security breach if the application you're using the chip in depends on periodic (or boot-time) reprogramming of the FPGA. In either case, either the physical security or the trust chain of your firmware loads is broken. As we all know, key management and side channel attacks are the hardest part of implementing a secure crypto system, so is this really news?

gouranga2• 14 years ago

The bit that surprises the fuck out of me is that they're buying stuff in from China. I've never seen that - ever! They would buy expensive stuff fabbed specially in the US rather than import usually.

I did a lot of work for the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defence over the years on custom silicon and FPGA work and the paranoia factor is scary. We had the layouts of everything bought in - even 74-series logic which can pretty much be assumed to be inert. Samples were regularly decapped and scanned using an SEM to verify to make sure the vendors weren't screwing us or integrating backdoors.

Every part was asset managed to hell as well. Every part was traceable to the point that every finger that poked it was known (I moved from engineering to writing the asset management systems before leaving).

Crazy.

toufka• 14 years ago

I think the problem is that there are too many suppliers. Everyone wants to be a middle-man. If the government asks for domestic parts from it's big contractors, the big ones ask their small ones, and they ask theirs and so on. But at the end of the day someone realizes it's cheaper to outsource it - does so - and forges the documentation. As the part travels all the way back up the chain each one says it's domestic.

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

wolf550e2• 14 years ago

They need custody chain management. I assumed they had one. And everyone who signed for it has securety clearance meaning they signed a paper that basically says "I understand that I'll go to jail for twenty years if I'm caught lying about anything".

DanBC4• 14 years ago

The chain is audited regularly.

A manufacturer outsourcing stuff has a hell of a lot of documentation to forge. Each screw, each washer, each resistor, has a batch number that it can be traced to.

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Hopefully this isn't too political for HN, but I suggest combining your surprise with the news that China was given a direct line around Wall Street to buy Treasuries directly from the USG:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/21/us-usa-treasuries-...

There's a relationship here.

cantankerous4• 14 years ago

I'm not sure I see the problem. They let the biggest debt buyer cut out the middle man. I'm sure there was some backroom dealing going on there, but it seems like the biggest losers there are the middlemen who wound up getting cut out.

h84ru3a2• 14 years ago

Maybe they do not trust the FPGA's being supplied to Wall St.?

Does Wall St. check for backdoors in hardware?

photon137• 14 years ago

That line is available to any other central bank in the world without going through primary dealers at all - it's just that China is using it to avoid giving info of its UST holdings or buying/selling trends to the open market.

This is especially important now as China has widened the Yuan trading band. You wouldn't want excessive FX volatility to manifest itself as a result of your foreign-reserve management decisions being (mis)-interpreted by investment banks.

kunle• 14 years ago

> "China was given a direct line around Wall Street to buy Treasuries directly from the USG"

This isn't particularly surprising - several large "real money" investors (pensions and the like) have had this sort of relationship with the Treasury. It enabled them to directly place bids on Treasury issuance without going through Primary broker-dealers (Wall Street). They were called "Directs" and would bid through the "TreasuryDirect" system.

Basically enabled the largest investors in USG securities to bypass the "commissions" other investors would pay to Wall Street firms.

I'm guessing that for some reason foreign accounts such as governments and sovereign funds had not been given access to this system for some reason, and after a point, the Chinese government investment funds (which are some of the largest in the world both in terms of funds managed and funds committed to the US) laid bare the inconsistency that they'd been disallowed this, simply on the grounds of being foreign.

Otherwise unremarkable.

tosseraccount• 14 years ago

Any and everybody can bypass Wall Street to purchase US Treasury bonds:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/

ktizo3• 14 years ago

The bit that surprises the fuck out of me is that they're buying stuff in from China. I've never seen that - ever!

Where else are they going to get the chips in the quantities required since the US outsourced most of its commercial silicon foundries? Of the few remaining in the US, the largest is wholly owned by the Taiwanese company TSMC. Post-industrial economics is idiotic, and this is one of the major examples of why.

crusso• 14 years ago

> Post-industrial economics is idiotic, and this is one of the major examples of why.

You say that like the US Military (among other US and non-US government victims) doesn't have the ability to dictate sourcing of parts to the point of driving the growth of domestic foundries.

This looks more like poor decision making, not a fact of "post-industrial economics".

valgaze• 14 years ago

Senate Armed Services Report: http://armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfeit%20...

krschultz• 14 years ago

You can get anything made in the US, it just may cost an egregious amount. The military will do it without batting an eye.

We (government contractor) pay a bunch extra to buy tools made in the US - even if they aren't normally manufactured here - just to satisfy the buy US provisions.

Typically what happens is that a subcontractor says it is US made, and then outsources to a foreign country and pockets the difference. Obviously there is money to be made there.

However, that is defrauding the government and those subcontractors can/will/do go to federal prison.

Symmetry3• 14 years ago

Commercial silicon foundaries, yes, but Intel, IBM, TI, National, etc all still have their own fabs in the US. Also, isn't Global Foundaries building a new fab in New York right now?

aiscott2• 14 years ago

I simply do not believe one could find a "back door" looking at a chip in a SEM. It sounds to me like you are describing destructive physical analysis whose purpose is to make sure requisite manufacturing practices are being followed.

lukeschlather• 14 years ago

The way I read that is that they make the designs and look for circuitry that does not match the designs, which is presumed to be backdoors. I would think that defects and intentional backdoors would both be findable on an SEM. Do you think otherwise? I don't have a ton of experience with bare silicon, so I'd be interested to know if that's unreasonable.

kwantam• 14 years ago

There are companies that specialize in reverse engineering schematics from silicon. It's entirely possible (albeit relatively expensive and time-consuming compared to good old-fashioned industrial espionage) to recover schematics from silicon.

Have a look at this video from ChipWorks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il5sTZKBLO0

See the schematics? They've created those from scratch by deconstructing the chip. (I can say with certainty that this is the case because I'm familiar with the original schematics for this part. The ChipWorks ones are much neater!)

Doing this for a larger, all-digital chip is substantially the same. In that case you can probably step up from identifying individual transistors and identify the standard cells directly, since they tend to have distinctive-looking gate structures.

pcrh• 14 years ago

There is still a lot of semiconductor manufacturing in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricati...

Nelson69• 14 years ago

There is this perpetual balancing game being played. The rules have changed for different US agencies over the years, originally it was only "100% made in the USA" or maybe some select partners (the UK and Israel perhaps) but due to competitive pressures and pricing for a lot of federal products, it's okay to assemble in the US and source parts from where ever. DoD has slightly stronger rules and then really strong rules for some devices.

Bottom line is to make any sort of computer at a remotely competitive price, you're probably going to use some Asian parts. At least some parts. Then it's a matter of where you draw the line and the price vs. risk. How about a Chinese power supply? It all depends on where and how the device is being used. Then it also depends on the system not "promoting" that device to another purpose.

You can manage it all and make it from only 100% trusted sources, but you know what? It's insanely expensive and by the time you get a computer, there are ones on the market 6x better.

spec_laconic• 14 years ago

TL; DR - No proof / source code / details on the backdoor - Outlandish claims of this being a "stuxnet" weapon

Show me some source, a schematic, or a technique that you're using, and then I might believe you, otherwise this is just FUD. They didn't even name the bloody chip.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

Hm. I wonder if these chips are used in consumer devices?

liuming• 14 years ago

Dear Greeks, we Trojans can't make our own horse, so can we buy one from you, please? No worry, I'll blame you later.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

To people complaining about the language - this reads more like a short briefing note for politicians or non-technical managers. That's why things like Stuxnet are mentioned; to give context and scale.

The author would probably like to stay involved with this tech, or at least to be able to hand it off to CESG.[1]

[1] I assume CESG. Perhaps QinetiQ[2] would do it?

[2] I have no idea what they do. All those Qs? You've seen 007? They're the real Q department. I doubt they do laser beam watches.

fiatmoney• 14 years ago

Two thoughts:

1) Say what you will about the military-industrial complex, but they do buy a load of physical products. When those are sourced domestically it has a lot of good spillover effects on the rest of the industry (see Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley).

2) I'd be far more worried about Intel, AMD, nVidia, Texas Instruments, et al, especially if I was a foreign procurement officer. The logic in those chips is incredibly complex and almost impossible to verify in any detail by a third party. Coincidentally, they're all US companies.

epo• 14 years ago

We Brits buy an awful lot of equipment from America, I always took it for granted that the Americans had backdoors in this gear but now seems that so might the Chinese. Wonderful!

eps• 14 years ago

Several months ago there was a report of similar nature that mainstream Intel CPUs include a concealed (hyper-)hypervisor that appears to exist in China-produced chips, but absent from pre-production samples made by Intel themselves. I don't know where this all went, but it was some Russian guy who found it by accident, and he was largely dismissed as a loon and generally laughed at (though from I could tell he did know a thing or two about hypervisors, system programming and what not).

rsanchez1• 14 years ago

Evidently, the military prefers to cut cost rather than have complete control over the manufacturing of their computer chips. Spending hundreds of millions on jets that have to be American-made is fine, but it's on the computer chips powering those jets and pretty much all advanced military technology that they have to save money.

Bud• 14 years ago

Hundreds of millions? You're off by about three orders of magnitude, there.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Interesting discussion. Some denial, some tin hat, some contemplative. I think I've had all of those emotions with this sort of thing.

There are diagnostics in our network switches that allow for traffic to be replicated and sent to other ports with a different destination mac (this isn't port mirroring is more like port re-directing). Clearly in the hands of a bad guy they might set up a machine on the LAN to get a copy of all the traffic. Is it a cyberwar beach head? Probably not. Could it be exploited in an attack? Probably. Of course if someone tried to route all that traffic outside the network into the transit network it would be pretty obvious. So not a good scenario.

Like the controller back door article on Ars last month I suspect most of these things are diagnostic aids. You ask an engineer to test something and that something is buried inside a bunch of silicon and the only way to do that is to build some stuff in there that lets you look at things.

Of course you can do this in a 'smart' way, and in a 'stupid' way. When I started at Intel there were extra pads on the silicon that got to these extra functions, you ordered a 'bond-out' chip where bonding wires (between the chip pins and the silicon) would be attached. All of the in circuit emulators up to the 386 had a 'bond out' version in the emulator pod that gave you access to internal state of the chip. Others have pointed out the key for loading replacement microcode, another 'feature' to fix bugs in the field and do diagnostics.

So things which require either 'special' chips or attaching a JTAG probe directly to the part, are generally ok in my book. Once you have physical access nearly all bets are off.

Its an expensive way to compromise the enemy. Simpler to just build a piece of gear that looks and operates exactly like the original but is your own design. There was some counterfeit Cisco boxes like this in the channel for a bit. Of course they 'fail' when you update IOS and it fails. Still the cost to exploit is lower and more assured than back dooring silicon in a fab.

Its also pretty hard to add features to a chip without the designer of the chip in on the game. Every transistor is accounted for by long verification and analysis so 'extra' ones would show up. That limits the risk to a chip manufacturer being the 'bad guy' (and they are very traceable so unlikely to do that)

None of this though should take away from the excellent work Cambridge is doing. The silicon analysis is really cutting edge stuff, and I think it would be useful for chip designers in verifying their masks are accurate too. If you could effectively 'decompile' the resulting silicon and verify it against your netlist, that would catch mask errors. And that would save anywhere from $100,000 to $2,000,000 depending on size of the mask.

dantiberian• 14 years ago

To clarify for people reading, IOS is the name of Cisco's operating system for their router's and network switches. Apple licensed the trademark from Cisco when they switched the naming of their mobile operating system.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_ios...

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Confusingly, IBM's mainframes run on the "i" operating system.

sneak• 14 years ago

Earth is case-sensitive:

iOS == Apple's mobile OS

IOS == Internetwork OS (Cisco gear)

Further:

Mac == Macintosh

MAC == Media Access Control (Address), common in configuration of Cisco equipment...

lifeisstillgood2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry I am not sure what you are saying here. It seems to be "this is far more likely to be a test engineers backdoor that was not on the spec" then a Chinese backdoor added at the fab"

with no evidence either way, I am guessing that US intelligence (and others?) are loudly saying this is happening not because they can prove it in silicon but convincing human intelligence has told them

I happen to think that the techniques developed to analysis silicon are going to be useful all round, and that a backdoor in a chip does not make a successful cyber attack in the wild, but if these are real in-the-fab additions then the implications are so large we should be prepared to not label this "it's just a test component" and look at ideas like validating silicon (noted somewherre else below)

jasonwatkinspdx2• 14 years ago

The NSA has it's own fab resources. That fact alone tells you everything you need to know. The only remaining question is to what extent is it cost effective to still use suspect parts.

mhurron• 14 years ago

> with no evidence either way, I am guessing that US intelligence (and others?) are loudly saying this is happening not because they can prove it in silicon but convincing human intelligence has told them

My instincts would be that in the absence of real evidence they are 'loudly saying this is happening' to beat the war drums, declare it as proof a 'cyberwar' is happening, are using it to get more funding and preparing for new draconian measures to control it both domestically and internationally.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

You are correct, there is no evidence either way. So one way to look at it is to consider what would have to be true for it to be installed by the 'fab' without the knowledge of the guy who designed the chip, vs installed by the chip designer.

Given what I know of silicon chip manufacturing, and the verification that goes on during, after, and while, manufacturing. I assert it would be extraordinarily difficult for a fab operator (like TSMC) to insert a back door without the designer/manufacturer knowing it.

I also brought up that in my experience adding back doors was certainly done to aid in testability. Sometimes those aids are done in a way that they cannot be used by third parties (bond-out chips) and sometimes they could be (JTAG access) but are obscured in some way.

Backdoor access in the firmware however, is a much easier threat to actualize as it doesn't involve silicon hacking per se. So that is a more credible threat. And I mentioned that we've seen counterfeit versions of 'name brand' products already which would be a fairly straight forward threat.

bbromhead• 14 years ago

This appears to be an improvement on Differential Power Analysis attack against a FPGA. Congrats to the guys who discovered it!

It's interesting to note that in the DPA/SPA world the standard model of operation is to develop a new attack and then patent the countermeasures ;)

It should be noted that this is "probably" not a backdoor in the traditional sense (intentionally planted by some nefarious government organisation), rather just bad, leaky design that has been identified by an improved attack methodology...

helmut_hed• 14 years ago

As a former chip designer I question the idea that the manufacturer introduced this backdoor (if indeed there is one).

found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key...

It's hard to understand what this guy is talking about. Is he claiming that the manufacturer added additional hardware that the designers were unaware of? Or they made modifications to existing circuitry so it doesn't match the design? It would be very hard to do either without cooperation from the designers, especially given the paranoia of hardware engineers (and of defense hardware engineers, an entirely different level of paranoia). The question "are we manufacturing what we designed?" is one that is constantly asked throughout the lifetime of a part. In fact the answer, for individual parts, is often "no", because they can be defective. Still, the question is constantly asked with a variety of automated tools at all points of the manufacturing process.

Here's what I think he might have found: an additional fixed key introduced by the designers themselves into the chip, and having nothing special to do with the manufacturer. In other words, a deliberate backdoor.

chmike• 14 years ago

I share this opinion and I'm surprized so few HN readers have considered this possibility. It could make sense since the chinise could use the chip for themselves.

zhuzhuor• 14 years ago

an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China

How could the authors know the backdoor design is not the intent of American military?

onto3622• 14 years ago

That is really not good. We should develop those chips at home, obviously.

duckduckgouser• 14 years ago

First reaction to this for most including myself is that the U.S. is really f--ked. But if the U.S. found this out, odds are they had chips manufactured that looked like the Chinese version but really weren't, with the exception of some small detail, perhaps not on the chip but on the board, that would indicate that the chip was the "fixed" version.

But, this Frienemy war is not about taking advantage of these backdoors. That is the nuclear option. The war is about who has the potential to pwn the other.

BTW- I'm typing this on a Chinese netbook.

petrilli• 14 years ago

There is a reason that the NSA partnered with IBM to build the Trusted Foundry program. http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/tapo.shtml

codgercoder• 14 years ago

I reacted the same way to this news as to the news that an electrical distribution system was compromised over the Internet. That is, "are you kidding me?!". Just as it's stupid to connect certain critical systems to the public Internet, it's really silly to so loosely control military electronics sourcing.

offshoreguy1• 14 years ago

Well if the American government is dumb enough to outsource its production of military and national security grade chips to Communist China, it deserves whatever befalls it.

deepinit_arek• 14 years ago

Are yout trying to tell me they produce those chips in China LOL ... Idiocy just reached new level.

Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip

Related Stories