7 ms·

Nearly 20 years ago I was attacked on forums for suggesting such treats were even a possibility. What surprised me was the vehemence of the attack - that is I h

Nearly 20 years ago I was attacked on forums for suggesting such treats were even a possibility. What surprised me was the vehemence of the attack - that is I had a damn hide and temerity to even suggest the notion was possible. What they didn't realize was that several years earlier that as a part of my work I'd been given the job of investigating if backdoors had been installed on certain critical hardware. Yes, it's palpable and it's been so for a long time, unfortunately I'm not at liberty to be more specific. Don't be fooled by the deafening silence from hardware types. Knowlwdge of existing treats and the current 'security' climate/milieu along with basic commonsense ought to suggest this problem is already with us and will be increasingly so in the near future.

upofadown 4y ago
>What they didn't realize was that several years earlier that as a part of my work I'd been given the job of investigating if backdoors had been installed on certain critical hardware. So did you find anything?
- hilbert42 4y ago
  See reply to jart.
LinuxBender 4y ago
Nearly 20 years ago I was attacked on forums for suggesting such treats were even a possibility. I think you are describing cult behavior. I've seen managers do this to protect questionable deals they made with dodgy vendors. For what it's worth, I've seen some of this in action on firewalls that shall not be named. They assumed incorrectly that we would not see the devices trying to phone home on the management cards and by home I mean a sanctioned country. This was in the hardware and not the firewall OS. I have also met a team responsible for managing the backdoor on the management boards that also shall not be named. Their backdoor was said to be for access by their support team when customers locked themselves out. All the other backdoors I've seen were either in the OS or vendor packages. Some vendors get really nervous when their clients gain root access to their appliances and start poking around.
- R0b0t1 4y ago
  I think it's more likely it was astroturf/COINTELPRO related.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Normally I'd consider this conspiracy theorist stuff, but at this point it's pretty clear that it's happening, that state actors are involved, and that they're very much interested in keeping what they have and that means distracting us from the problem and dismissing that it exists. Hardware manufacturers are partly to blame too, both for not testing their products to catch these threats, but also for the lack of transparency. I get that it'd be difficult/expensive to recall and replace a bunch of physical devices which may or may not all be backdoored, and I wouldn't be surprised if some companies were told not to by some three letter agency here in the US too, but if it comes to light that they have been knowingly selling compromised hardware they should be dragged into court and made to pay for it.
hilbert42 4y ago
Typo - for 'treats' read 'threats'. ;-)
empyrrhicist 4y ago
And with everything demanding to be online all the time, and cellular hardware becoming cheaper, and the software side being some combination of insecure/malicious in our surveillance capitalism dystopia... it's yet another aspect of modern life that is too uncomfortable to think about, and about which it's easy to feel powerless. Throw it on the pile with the various environmental apocalypses and global resurgence of authoritarianism.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  ... it's yet another aspect of modern life that is too uncomfortable to think about, and about which it's easy to feel powerless. Very true, and I often do. What I find so troubling is why more people don't complain more often, we need sufficient complainers to reach critical mass and so often that's not the case. Take another such matter - the unreasonableness and unfairness of current international copyright law. It is this way and will likely remain so for a long time simply—as Cory Doctorow who regularly writes on such matters says 'the whingers and complainers are far too few in number to make any difference, they're just irrelevant noise in the political debate [note: that's my phraseology of his actual quote]. The fact is the average person couldn't give a damn about copyright law. Same goes for many other important issues, especially surveillance capitalism! Yes, here many are aware of the fact and they actually care about it but in the yin and yang battle between surveillance capitalism and users' worry that they're under surveillance and the 'good feelings' generated by Google's and Facebook's 'free' apps then every time those apps win out by miles! Correct, these surveillance capitalism bastards use their sophisticated knowledge of human psychology to ensure that the balance is always in their favor. (Remember, this is an age-old trick, the emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum to distract the minds of Roman citizens from local troubles.) Tragically, our governments have done precious little to correct the problem - and again much of that can be put down to the millions of dollars Big Tech spends on lobbying governments. We citizens are seemingly always on the the losing end when big money is involved. ...But as an individual you can do something about it. Your efforts may be small and they might only benefit you but they're not nought. Only yesterday in reply to the HN story Making Quieter Technology I wrote a badly-written long-winded reply† to show how one could tackle the problem of surveillance capitalism: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32383493 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32383493. Bad it may be but my efforts count for something more than just zero. ...the pile with the various environmental apocalypses and global resurgence of authoritarianism. Can't agree more. For me, the resurgence of authoritarianism is the more important of the two, for without citizen autonomy we've little or no control over environmental apocalypses let alone the many other existing worldwide problems; in effect authoritarianism neuters us. Depressing yes, but every little tweak helps (especially so if everyone's doing it). D:< & >:( __ † Yes, my reply was long because it included specific actions but it was not long enough to do a good job, a blog would have been a better approach. Unfortunately, as good as 'HN comments' is, it isn't an ideal place to do this.
jart 4y ago
It's worrying to see multiple folks talking about how they've seen hardware exploitation yet aren't allowed to talk about it. It'd suggest insecurity is something they're not allowed to address and forced to accept, which is worse than being hacked. What makes hardware weaknesses so troubling is due to how close software lets untrusted code get to the metal, with things like jit gpus and wasm. Mix that with ad exchanges that let anyone bid to run code on your computer, and I wonder why the world hasn't imploded yet.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  It's worrying to see multiple folks talking about how they've seen hardware exploitation yet aren't allowed to talk about it. You're correct, it is worrying but sometimes it's inevitable. Moreover it's worse when governments get involved. In my case I've signed documents that strictly limit me from being explicit.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  In the first few decades of the electronics industry, every device was provided with huge amounts of information in its datasheets and databooks. That allowed an electronics engineer to make detailed comparisons between many alternatives before buying any samples and it also allowed the creation of many designs where the components where used for purposes that were very different from anything imagined by their vendors. Already after 1990, but especially after 2000, the amount of technical documentation about hardware components that is available freely has dropped dramatically and now for most of the more complex hardware components it is possible to obtain enough information to make a design only after signing non-disclosure agreements. This fashion of the NDA's has made it very difficult to create really innovative products or new competitors in an existing market. For a company already established in a market, which only does new versions of old products, obtaining the documentation under NDA is trivial. On the other hand, for designing an innovative product, obtaining the documentation is very hard. One reason is that there is a vicious circle, until you have all the documentation, you cannot know which is the component that is suitable for your design, so you cannot commit to buy it, but many companies will not provide the documentation before you can convince them that you are committed to buy quantities large enough of that component. Even the documentation obtained under NDA is usually much less complete than what could be obtained freely a few decades ago, so not only it is impossible to determine whether the component could be used for any other purpose than that specified by the vendor, but usually the documentation is not complete enough to determine with certainty that even the intended purpose can be accomplished. Because of that, in most hardware projects a series of tests on prototype boards are absolutely necessary to fill the gaps in the technical documentation provided by the vendor. So very frequently many designers have to duplicate the work of others in discovering workarounds for the bugs or lower performance than expected of various components, because even if they would want to share their experiences, they are prevented by the NDA's that they have signed. Unfortunately, being not allowed to talk about various technical facts, without any good reason to forbid this, has become a pervasive policy.
px43 4y ago
Lots of PoCs have been built over the years, but so far they've almost all been fun academic stunts, and not actually useful for real world scenarios. We live in an unprecedented era of understanding when it comes to technologies used by criminals, law enforcement, and every major intelligence agency on the planet, and none of them use chip backdoors, because they just aren't needed. Nearly every attack scenario you can imagine is better served by exploiting existing bugs, or parts of the software supply chain. Software based attacks scale better, and are easier to deny later. The closest we have to chip backdoors in practice is likely the hardware supply chain tampering for North Korea's missile program, which supposedly serves up the slightly off spec chips that cause their missiles to fail spectacularly every time they try and show them off. It makes no sense to have active backdoors like that in consumer electronics when there are so many more useful and easier to exploit bugs in existing devices.
- junofan 4y ago
  > none of them use chip backdoors We’re talking about GDSII files passed around on USB sticks in Chinese factories. Of course there’s blackbox IP on some chips in the wild.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Funny how you mention Chinese factories, and not the factories of the country that’s been proven to plant backdoors everywhere.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  ...and none of them use chip backdoors, because they just aren't needed. Despite my earlier comments, I think your point is essentially correct - at least it's so when it comes to what we normally consider as criminal behavior. However, that's not necessarily the case when it comes to manufacturers and or state actors who have the power to force manufacturers to secretly install backdoors into chips. Take the case of Huawei and the ban certain countries have placed on telco carriers using its telecommunications equipment. I'm not privy to the reasons as to why certain governments have banned Huawei but one doesn't have to be Einstein to read between the lines in that it would be almost impossible to check every chip in imported Huawei switches (even if it were practicably feasible (which is doubtful) then any such checking would make the normally-competitive Huawei considerably more expensive for telcos to install than if they were to purchase from its competitors). Huawei is and has been on a solid push to develop its own technologies, to quote Wiki "Meanwhile, it was reverse-engineering imported switches and investing heavily in research and development to manufacture its own technologies". With the support, authority and might of the Chinese Government it's not hard to imagine that a chip with a backdoor could be implanted in such equipment. Moreover, this may not happen immediately but rather some years later after an innocuous maintenance fix long after all the original brouhaha had died down.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
R0b0t1 4y ago
> unfortunately I'm not at liberty to be more specific. Gun to the head change your mind?
- hilbert42 4y ago
  The info is dated now, but unfortunately NDAs don't expire.
_8j50 4y ago
People like that still exist. The type of people that say shit like "well if that happens we have a much bigger problem". They should never be involved in any security related discussion.
midislack 4y ago
There's clearly a long running operation to poo poo such accusations.
blooalien 4y ago
> "Nearly 20 years ago I was attacked on forums for suggesting such threats were even a possibility. What surprised me was the vehemence of the attack - that is I had a damn hide and temerity to even suggest the notion was possible." Welcome to the club… I been ridiculed my entire life for warnings and suggestions that decades later have all played out exactly as predicted. I've long since given up on humanity. We're just another doomed species that hasn't realized it yet.
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  My favourite part of this is watching what RMS has to say, watching it come to pass, and, finally, watching others dismiss his newer concerns. People may not like him as a person, and that's neither here nor there. What's depressing is the continued sleepwalking (by society at large, and geeky sub-groups in particular) into a dystopian future where the OEM has all the power.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "What's depressing is the continued sleepwalking (by society at large, and geeky sub-groups in particular)..." RMS isn't the most lovable person around but he's pretty much always been factual and on message. Why people - especially those 'in the know' - cannot separate their dislike of a person from his/her message is something that I don't quite understand. Discarding a message on the grounds of disliking the messenger is illogical and it makes me wince whenever I see it in those who ought to know better. The truly worrying and troubling aspect of this is that I've never considered myself the most level headed or logical person in the world (the volume control on my amygdala is broken and I often can't turn its 'noise' down). So when I see techies behaving more illogically than me I have grave concerns for the world. I experience cognitive dissonance regularly (it's difficult not to in this day and age), however I'm not only aware of the fact but also I'm continually fighting and reasoning with the conundrums it raises. Again, it's somewhat of a mystery to me why many of those who are of a technical and logical bent aren't similarly conflicted. You're right, it's very depressing when many of the intelligentsia are asleep at the wheel and or refuse responsibly. The consequences are that it's not only the OEMs we have to worry about but also those authoritarians who'll take charge in the intelligentsia's absence. Without ongoing logical and reasoned debate a dystopian future is almost certainly assured.
kloch 4y ago
About 12 years ago I had several (big ISP) routers that were punting all ESP packets to the routing engine for forwarding, instead of the normal path of using ASIC's on the line cards. This was noticed because I had some customers with a lot of IPSEC traffic and there is very little capacity to forward packets using the CPU on the routing engine, so packets were being dropped. When I opened a case with the hardware vendor and described the problem they immediately and tersely asked for a shipping address and how many cards I wanted to replace. They didn't even check for support contracts, which was unheard of especially for an expensive part like this. These routers were purchased on the grey market so I always assumed there was some kind of (botched?) tampering with the hardware and the vendor was at least aware of it.

upofadown 4y ago

>What they didn't realize was that several years earlier that as a part of my work I'd been given the job of investigating if backdoors had been installed on certain critical hardware. So did you find anything?

hilbert42 4y ago
See reply to jart.

LinuxBender 4y ago

Nearly 20 years ago I was attacked on forums for suggesting such treats were even a possibility. I think you are describing cult behavior. I've seen managers do this to protect questionable deals they made with dodgy vendors. For what it's worth, I've seen some of this in action on firewalls that shall not be named. They assumed incorrectly that we would not see the devices trying to phone home on the management cards and by home I mean a sanctioned country. This was in the hardware and not the firewall OS. I have also met a team responsible for managing the backdoor on the management boards that also shall not be named. Their backdoor was said to be for access by their support team when customers locked themselves out. All the other backdoors I've seen were either in the OS or vendor packages. Some vendors get really nervous when their clients gain root access to their appliances and start poking around.

R0b0t1 4y ago
I think it's more likely it was astroturf/COINTELPRO related.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Normally I'd consider this conspiracy theorist stuff, but at this point it's pretty clear that it's happening, that state actors are involved, and that they're very much interested in keeping what they have and that means distracting us from the problem and dismissing that it exists. Hardware manufacturers are partly to blame too, both for not testing their products to catch these threats, but also for the lack of transparency. I get that it'd be difficult/expensive to recall and replace a bunch of physical devices which may or may not all be backdoored, and I wouldn't be surprised if some companies were told not to by some three letter agency here in the US too, but if it comes to light that they have been knowingly selling compromised hardware they should be dragged into court and made to pay for it.

hilbert42 4y ago

Typo - for 'treats' read 'threats'. ;-)

empyrrhicist 4y ago

And with everything demanding to be online all the time, and cellular hardware becoming cheaper, and the software side being some combination of insecure/malicious in our surveillance capitalism dystopia... it's yet another aspect of modern life that is too uncomfortable to think about, and about which it's easy to feel powerless. Throw it on the pile with the various environmental apocalypses and global resurgence of authoritarianism.

hilbert42 4y ago
... it's yet another aspect of modern life that is too uncomfortable to think about, and about which it's easy to feel powerless. Very true, and I often do. What I find so troubling is why more people don't complain more often, we need sufficient complainers to reach critical mass and so often that's not the case. Take another such matter - the unreasonableness and unfairness of current international copyright law. It is this way and will likely remain so for a long time simply—as Cory Doctorow who regularly writes on such matters says 'the whingers and complainers are far too few in number to make any difference, they're just irrelevant noise in the political debate [note: that's my phraseology of his actual quote]. The fact is the average person couldn't give a damn about copyright law. Same goes for many other important issues, especially surveillance capitalism! Yes, here many are aware of the fact and they actually care about it but in the yin and yang battle between surveillance capitalism and users' worry that they're under surveillance and the 'good feelings' generated by Google's and Facebook's 'free' apps then every time those apps win out by miles! Correct, these surveillance capitalism bastards use their sophisticated knowledge of human psychology to ensure that the balance is always in their favor. (Remember, this is an age-old trick, the emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum to distract the minds of Roman citizens from local troubles.) Tragically, our governments have done precious little to correct the problem - and again much of that can be put down to the millions of dollars Big Tech spends on lobbying governments. We citizens are seemingly always on the the losing end when big money is involved. ...But as an individual you can do something about it. Your efforts may be small and they might only benefit you but they're not nought. Only yesterday in reply to the HN story Making Quieter Technology I wrote a badly-written long-winded reply† to show how one could tackle the problem of surveillance capitalism: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32383493 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32383493. Bad it may be but my efforts count for something more than just zero. ...the pile with the various environmental apocalypses and global resurgence of authoritarianism. Can't agree more. For me, the resurgence of authoritarianism is the more important of the two, for without citizen autonomy we've little or no control over environmental apocalypses let alone the many other existing worldwide problems; in effect authoritarianism neuters us. Depressing yes, but every little tweak helps (especially so if everyone's doing it). D:< & >:( __ † Yes, my reply was long because it included specific actions but it was not long enough to do a good job, a blog would have been a better approach. Unfortunately, as good as 'HN comments' is, it isn't an ideal place to do this.

jart 4y ago

It's worrying to see multiple folks talking about how they've seen hardware exploitation yet aren't allowed to talk about it. It'd suggest insecurity is something they're not allowed to address and forced to accept, which is worse than being hacked. What makes hardware weaknesses so troubling is due to how close software lets untrusted code get to the metal, with things like jit gpus and wasm. Mix that with ad exchanges that let anyone bid to run code on your computer, and I wonder why the world hasn't imploded yet.

hilbert42 4y ago
It's worrying to see multiple folks talking about how they've seen hardware exploitation yet aren't allowed to talk about it. You're correct, it is worrying but sometimes it's inevitable. Moreover it's worse when governments get involved. In my case I've signed documents that strictly limit me from being explicit.
adrian_b 4y ago
In the first few decades of the electronics industry, every device was provided with huge amounts of information in its datasheets and databooks. That allowed an electronics engineer to make detailed comparisons between many alternatives before buying any samples and it also allowed the creation of many designs where the components where used for purposes that were very different from anything imagined by their vendors. Already after 1990, but especially after 2000, the amount of technical documentation about hardware components that is available freely has dropped dramatically and now for most of the more complex hardware components it is possible to obtain enough information to make a design only after signing non-disclosure agreements. This fashion of the NDA's has made it very difficult to create really innovative products or new competitors in an existing market. For a company already established in a market, which only does new versions of old products, obtaining the documentation under NDA is trivial. On the other hand, for designing an innovative product, obtaining the documentation is very hard. One reason is that there is a vicious circle, until you have all the documentation, you cannot know which is the component that is suitable for your design, so you cannot commit to buy it, but many companies will not provide the documentation before you can convince them that you are committed to buy quantities large enough of that component. Even the documentation obtained under NDA is usually much less complete than what could be obtained freely a few decades ago, so not only it is impossible to determine whether the component could be used for any other purpose than that specified by the vendor, but usually the documentation is not complete enough to determine with certainty that even the intended purpose can be accomplished. Because of that, in most hardware projects a series of tests on prototype boards are absolutely necessary to fill the gaps in the technical documentation provided by the vendor. So very frequently many designers have to duplicate the work of others in discovering workarounds for the bugs or lower performance than expected of various components, because even if they would want to share their experiences, they are prevented by the NDA's that they have signed. Unfortunately, being not allowed to talk about various technical facts, without any good reason to forbid this, has become a pervasive policy.

px43 4y ago

Lots of PoCs have been built over the years, but so far they've almost all been fun academic stunts, and not actually useful for real world scenarios. We live in an unprecedented era of understanding when it comes to technologies used by criminals, law enforcement, and every major intelligence agency on the planet, and none of them use chip backdoors, because they just aren't needed. Nearly every attack scenario you can imagine is better served by exploiting existing bugs, or parts of the software supply chain. Software based attacks scale better, and are easier to deny later. The closest we have to chip backdoors in practice is likely the hardware supply chain tampering for North Korea's missile program, which supposedly serves up the slightly off spec chips that cause their missiles to fail spectacularly every time they try and show them off. It makes no sense to have active backdoors like that in consumer electronics when there are so many more useful and easier to exploit bugs in existing devices.

junofan 4y ago
> none of them use chip backdoors We’re talking about GDSII files passed around on USB sticks in Chinese factories. Of course there’s blackbox IP on some chips in the wild.
- trasz 4y ago
  Funny how you mention Chinese factories, and not the factories of the country that’s been proven to plant backdoors everywhere.
hilbert42 4y ago
...and none of them use chip backdoors, because they just aren't needed. Despite my earlier comments, I think your point is essentially correct - at least it's so when it comes to what we normally consider as criminal behavior. However, that's not necessarily the case when it comes to manufacturers and or state actors who have the power to force manufacturers to secretly install backdoors into chips. Take the case of Huawei and the ban certain countries have placed on telco carriers using its telecommunications equipment. I'm not privy to the reasons as to why certain governments have banned Huawei but one doesn't have to be Einstein to read between the lines in that it would be almost impossible to check every chip in imported Huawei switches (even if it were practicably feasible (which is doubtful) then any such checking would make the normally-competitive Huawei considerably more expensive for telcos to install than if they were to purchase from its competitors). Huawei is and has been on a solid push to develop its own technologies, to quote Wiki "Meanwhile, it was reverse-engineering imported switches and investing heavily in research and development to manufacture its own technologies". With the support, authority and might of the Chinese Government it's not hard to imagine that a chip with a backdoor could be implanted in such equipment. Moreover, this may not happen immediately but rather some years later after an innocuous maintenance fix long after all the original brouhaha had died down.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

R0b0t1 4y ago

> unfortunately I'm not at liberty to be more specific. Gun to the head change your mind?

hilbert42 4y ago
The info is dated now, but unfortunately NDAs don't expire.

_8j50 4y ago

People like that still exist. The type of people that say shit like "well if that happens we have a much bigger problem". They should never be involved in any security related discussion.

midislack 4y ago

There's clearly a long running operation to poo poo such accusations.

blooalien 4y ago

> "Nearly 20 years ago I was attacked on forums for suggesting such threats were even a possibility. What surprised me was the vehemence of the attack - that is I had a damn hide and temerity to even suggest the notion was possible." Welcome to the club… I been ridiculed my entire life for warnings and suggestions that decades later have all played out exactly as predicted. I've long since given up on humanity. We're just another doomed species that hasn't realized it yet.

29083011397778 4y ago
My favourite part of this is watching what RMS has to say, watching it come to pass, and, finally, watching others dismiss his newer concerns. People may not like him as a person, and that's neither here nor there. What's depressing is the continued sleepwalking (by society at large, and geeky sub-groups in particular) into a dystopian future where the OEM has all the power.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "What's depressing is the continued sleepwalking (by society at large, and geeky sub-groups in particular)..." RMS isn't the most lovable person around but he's pretty much always been factual and on message. Why people - especially those 'in the know' - cannot separate their dislike of a person from his/her message is something that I don't quite understand. Discarding a message on the grounds of disliking the messenger is illogical and it makes me wince whenever I see it in those who ought to know better. The truly worrying and troubling aspect of this is that I've never considered myself the most level headed or logical person in the world (the volume control on my amygdala is broken and I often can't turn its 'noise' down). So when I see techies behaving more illogically than me I have grave concerns for the world. I experience cognitive dissonance regularly (it's difficult not to in this day and age), however I'm not only aware of the fact but also I'm continually fighting and reasoning with the conundrums it raises. Again, it's somewhat of a mystery to me why many of those who are of a technical and logical bent aren't similarly conflicted. You're right, it's very depressing when many of the intelligentsia are asleep at the wheel and or refuse responsibly. The consequences are that it's not only the OEMs we have to worry about but also those authoritarians who'll take charge in the intelligentsia's absence. Without ongoing logical and reasoned debate a dystopian future is almost certainly assured.

kloch 4y ago

About 12 years ago I had several (big ISP) routers that were punting all ESP packets to the routing engine for forwarding, instead of the normal path of using ASIC's on the line cards. This was noticed because I had some customers with a lot of IPSEC traffic and there is very little capacity to forward packets using the CPU on the routing engine, so packets were being dropped. When I opened a case with the hardware vendor and described the problem they immediately and tersely asked for a shipping address and how many cards I wanted to replace. They didn't even check for support contracts, which was unheard of especially for an expensive part like this. These routers were purchased on the grey market so I always assumed there was some kind of (botched?) tampering with the hardware and the vendor was at least aware of it.