4 ms·

This is (still) a stupidly reckless approach to "addressing" the supply chain counterfeit problem. One of these days they're going to brick a pacemaker and kil

by ohazi 11y ago

This is (still) a stupidly reckless approach to "addressing" the supply chain counterfeit problem. One of these days they're going to brick a pacemaker and kill someone. You have to be a special kind of delusional to think that the courts are going to care about your "good intentions" when you knowingly release a driver like this. And "pacemaker" is really a placeholder for any system that could end up affecting safety of life, regardless of whether it was intentionally designed to. How many of these FTDI chips do you suppose are on a 747? An elevator controller? A fire suppression system? A one-off alarm system at a power plant? A nuclear power plant? How many hoops do you have to jump through before you start to leave your comfort zone? Not many... A single lawsuit from a bad enough accident could end the company in one fell swoop. This should be a much bigger existential concern for FTDI than any amount of potential IP theft. If I were their general council, I would be looking for the vigilante engineer to sumarily fire, and put in place mechanisms to ensure that this never happens in the future.

noonespecial 11y ago
I think the damage is done and more subtle than a huge public disaster. When the fake-killer driver burst onto the scene previously, I just switched to microchip MCP2221's. It just wasn't worth the risk that I might accidentally source a counterfeit on a BOM and not find out until later. If it says FTDI on it, its now a no go. Just no way to be sure anymore.
- snvzz 11y ago
  So that the next person doesn't have to search for it: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/20005292B.pdf http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/20005292B.pd...
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  Exactly. I switched to Cypress (CP2102) chips as a response to this, even though I haven't been hit with any of these tactics from FTDI yet. They work just great. Prolific (PL2303) work well too, but I've had some issues with high baud rates there so I avoid them. The fact is, it's impossible for me to know if an IC is genuine or not. Therefore, buying FTDI is now like playing russian roulette. If you got unlucky, you (or your customer) will have a nasty surprise, possibly years down the line. The rational choice is therefore to buy chips from manufacturers that don't do this.
  - russdill 11y ago
    I wish there was a decent alternative. CP2102's are absolutely dog slow when it comes to bit banging. You need entire round trips for everything.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  Holy crap, that part's incredible. Let me count the ways... 1. It's half the price of a FT232R. 2. It's available in SOIC. Much easier to solder. 3. It's USB CDC compliant. No drivers required on most OSes. 4. Along with GPIOs, its spare pins can also be configured for ADC or DAC operation. Also, it's got an I2C master. It doesn't have a full set of UART signals, unfortunately, but it does have a couple of configurable GPIOs. There's also the MCP2200 which sacrifices I2C for RTS/CTS.
  - noonespecial 11y ago
    What sold it for us was my friend said, "Hey that one comes in DIP so we can breadboard and test..." Never looked back.
    - quadrature 11y ago
      woah
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
st3v3r 11y ago
Read the article. They're not bricking things this time, just refusing to talk to them. And quite frankly, why should they be responsible for any of those things? Shouldn't the fault be on the people who used fake chips?
- orclev 11y ago
  Not quite, failing to talk to them would be not sending anything, what they're actually doing is much worse. Based on what people have seen it's sending random data to the device. E.G. I send it something like "Hello World" and it sends the device "Launch Nuke". If it actually failed to talk to the device that wouldn't be too bad, it would just look like the chip was defective. What it's doing is massively dangerous because it's basically performing fuzzing on the underlying device and who knows what that might trigger.
  - ohazi 11y ago
    > What it's doing is massively dangerous because it's basically performing fuzzing on the underlying device and who knows what that might trigger. Yes, this exactly. Most of the systems these chips are attached to are tiny embedded processors with very little RAM and no memory protection. It's almost a given that a non-negligible number of these systems will crash on this kind of input. The FTDI chip wouldn't even need to be in a critical signal path if it's spewing garbage all over memory.
- tyingq 11y ago
  Actually, no. Refusing to talk to them would result in the "Error 10", and the driver not loading. What they are doing is allowing the driver to attach, and then sending arbitrary random crap down the line. >>Shouldn't the fault be on the people who used fake chips? It doesn't appear that the problem is people buying fake chips on purpose. All of the large chip distributors have unwittingly sent out fakes. This approach punishes - the end users, who likely had no role in this at all - manufacturers of devices who thought they were buying legit chips

by ohazi 11y ago

noonespecial 11y ago

I think the damage is done and more subtle than a huge public disaster. When the fake-killer driver burst onto the scene previously, I just switched to microchip MCP2221's. It just wasn't worth the risk that I might accidentally source a counterfeit on a BOM and not find out until later. If it says FTDI on it, its now a no go. Just no way to be sure anymore.

snvzz 11y ago
So that the next person doesn't have to search for it: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/20005292B.pdf http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/20005292B.pd...
throwaway7767 11y ago
Exactly. I switched to Cypress (CP2102) chips as a response to this, even though I haven't been hit with any of these tactics from FTDI yet. They work just great. Prolific (PL2303) work well too, but I've had some issues with high baud rates there so I avoid them. The fact is, it's impossible for me to know if an IC is genuine or not. Therefore, buying FTDI is now like playing russian roulette. If you got unlucky, you (or your customer) will have a nasty surprise, possibly years down the line. The rational choice is therefore to buy chips from manufacturers that don't do this.
- russdill 11y ago
  I wish there was a decent alternative. CP2102's are absolutely dog slow when it comes to bit banging. You need entire round trips for everything.
duskwuff 11y ago
Holy crap, that part's incredible. Let me count the ways... 1. It's half the price of a FT232R. 2. It's available in SOIC. Much easier to solder. 3. It's USB CDC compliant. No drivers required on most OSes. 4. Along with GPIOs, its spare pins can also be configured for ADC or DAC operation. Also, it's got an I2C master. It doesn't have a full set of UART signals, unfortunately, but it does have a couple of configurable GPIOs. There's also the MCP2200 which sacrifices I2C for RTS/CTS.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  What sold it for us was my friend said, "Hey that one comes in DIP so we can breadboard and test..." Never looked back.
  - quadrature 11y ago
    woah
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

st3v3r 11y ago

Read the article. They're not bricking things this time, just refusing to talk to them. And quite frankly, why should they be responsible for any of those things? Shouldn't the fault be on the people who used fake chips?

orclev 11y ago
Not quite, failing to talk to them would be not sending anything, what they're actually doing is much worse. Based on what people have seen it's sending random data to the device. E.G. I send it something like "Hello World" and it sends the device "Launch Nuke". If it actually failed to talk to the device that wouldn't be too bad, it would just look like the chip was defective. What it's doing is massively dangerous because it's basically performing fuzzing on the underlying device and who knows what that might trigger.
- ohazi 11y ago
  > What it's doing is massively dangerous because it's basically performing fuzzing on the underlying device and who knows what that might trigger. Yes, this exactly. Most of the systems these chips are attached to are tiny embedded processors with very little RAM and no memory protection. It's almost a given that a non-negligible number of these systems will crash on this kind of input. The FTDI chip wouldn't even need to be in a critical signal path if it's spewing garbage all over memory.
tyingq 11y ago
Actually, no. Refusing to talk to them would result in the "Error 10", and the driver not loading. What they are doing is allowing the driver to attach, and then sending arbitrary random crap down the line. >>Shouldn't the fault be on the people who used fake chips? It doesn't appear that the problem is people buying fake chips on purpose. All of the large chip distributors have unwittingly sent out fakes. This approach punishes - the end users, who likely had no role in this at all - manufacturers of devices who thought they were buying legit chips