Re: Hardware Viruses?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Bob Drzyzgula [bob () drzyzgula org]
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 1:22 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:    Hardware Viruses?

Dave,

Interesting related story in the May 2008 IEEE Spectrum.

--Bob Drzyzgula

http://spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6171

| The Hunt for the Kill Switch
| By  Sally Adee
|
| First Published May 2008
|
| Are chip makers building electronic trapdoors in key
| military hardware? The Pentagon is making its biggest
| effort yet to find out
|
| ---
|
| Last September, Israeli jets bombed a suspected
| nuclear installation in northeastern Syria. Among
| the many mysteries still surrounding that strike
| was the failure of a Syrian radar—supposedly
| state-of-the-art—to warn the Syrian military of
| the incoming assault. It wasn't long before military
| and technology bloggers concluded that this was
| an incident of electronic warfare—and not just
| any kind.
|
| Post after post speculated that the commercial
| off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar
| might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden
| “backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code
| to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted
| the chips' function and temporarily blocked the radar.
|
| That same basic scenario is cropping up more
| frequently lately, and not just in the Middle East,
| where conspiracy theories abound. According to a
| U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of
| anonymity, a “European chip maker” recently built
| into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be
| accessed remotely. French defense contractors have
| used the chips in military equipment, the contractor
| told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment
| fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a
| way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum
| could not confirm this account independently, but
| spirited discussion about it among researchers and
| another defense contractor last summer at a military
| research conference reveals a lot about the fever
| dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
|
| Feeding those dreams is the Pentagon's realization
| that it no longer controls who manufactures the
| components that go into its increasingly complex
| systems...

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 09:42:18AM -0700, David Farber wrote:
> Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 9:52 AM
> To: David Farber
> Cc: Kenneth_Mayer () Dell com
> Subject: Re: [IP] Hardware Viruses?
>
> Dave, Ken,
>
> I would say the article is inaccurate in the statement that the hardware
> vector is more difficult.
>
> On the contrary, ten years ago, the external peripherals I connected to
> my machine were limited to mice, keyboards and perhaps a printer. Even
> further back, hard drives themselves had no intelligent controllers (the
> interfaces today are false/logical, and have zero to do with actual
> drive construction, geometry to simplify the OS interface) Now the list
> of peripherals is nearly endless.
> ...




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