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Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip

536 points by turnersr 14y ago

Lednakashim 14y ago
Can somebody explain exactly what they got access to? What is encrypted?
- waiwai933 14y 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 14y 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."
- toemetoch 14y 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").
  - Lednakashim 14y ago
    Isn't it an FPGA chip?
- JL2010 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
Inquiry Into Counterfeit Electronic Parts in the DoD Supply Chain (PDF). http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfeit%20Electronic%20Parts.pdf http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...
gdubs 14y 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?
Estragon 14y 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.
- toemetoch 14y 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/Counterfeit%20Electronic%20Parts.pdf http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...
  - Estragon 14y 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.
    - mfukar 14y ago
      He needs to provide more specific information and evidence. Heed your own advice.
      - Estragon 14y ago
        I'm not the one making extraordinary claims.
- DanBC 14y ago
  He's an academic in England. Of course he's going to try to monetise his research.
  - Estragon 14y ago
    That doesn't make it any less suspect.
- 14y ago
mvip 14y 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. :)
Zak 14y 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-investigation-method-apparatus/WO2012046029.html http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Integrated-circuit-inv...
- tptacek 14y 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?
  - Zak 14y 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.
kryptiskt 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- DanBC 14y 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 14y 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.
tptacek 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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).
    - wamatt 14y ago
unimpressive 14y 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.
- cantankerous 14y 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 14y 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.
- tptacek 14y 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.
Create 14y ago
If it is from Actel, then it is CMMI certified :) www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/SG_talk_BA.pdf
- regularfry 14y ago
  Yeah, there's enough info on the scan to figure out the part family.
  - Create 14y ago
    ...its more fun than reading the keys (CB21 5DQ) from FLASH: Helion Technology Limited -- Helion Technology.
breck 14y 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 14y ago
  So, 100% of the backdoors I've ever heard about were not kept secret, therefore backdoors are unlikely to be kept secret. :-)
raphman 14y 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/ http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/ [2] http://www.actel.com/documents/pa3_faq.html http://www.actel.com/documents/pa3_faq.html (I guess there is no real advantage in keeping this obscured)
- femto 14y 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 14y 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 https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tamper.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tamper.html
  - JL2010 14y 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
gouranga 14y 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 14y 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.
  - wolf550e 14y 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".
    - Create 14y ago
      ...now you tell me. Political candidates should be required to sign the same stuff. And managers. And physicists. And PR stuntmen.
      - simonbrown 14y ago
spec_laconic 14y 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.
- ballard 14y ago
  Exactly my thought. It's simple enough to grab HN headlines, far harder to sustain attention without walking the walk. "It's not that I don't trust you, it's that I don't yet have necessary and sufficient evidence in relation to your claim to trust you."
regularfry 14y ago
Hm. I wonder if these chips are used in consumer devices?
liuming 14y 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.
DanBC 14y 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 14y 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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
epo 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  Hundreds of millions? You're off by about three orders of magnitude, there.
ChuckMcM 14y 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.
bbromhead 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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?
valugi 14y ago
1. you dont buy your military stuff from a potential enemy 2. US (and everybody) was (and probably still is) doing exactly the same. I do remember a scandal in the 80' concerning telephone systems sold behind the Iron Curtain by the US that could be kill remotely by an inner kill switch.
onto3622 14y ago
That is really not good. We should develop those chips at home, obviously.
duckduckgouser 14y 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 14y 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 http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/tapo.shtml
codgercoder 14y 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 14y 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.
jianmeng 14y ago
This thing is unfair for the china telecom companys. China telecom is JUST working hard for the aims that everybody in the world can enjoy communicate with each other,even in the poorest country. This aim is good to internet span quick in developing country. That bring us a better internet environment to start business. If UK is affair of cheap telecom equipment from China, Just buy Ericsson's. So stop those rummor.
deepinit_arek 14y ago
Are yout trying to tell me they produce those chips in China LOL ... Idiocy just reached new level.

536 points by turnersr 14y ago

Lednakashim 14y ago

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

waiwai933 14y 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 14y 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."
toemetoch 14y 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").
- Lednakashim 14y ago
  Isn't it an FPGA chip?
JL2010 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

Inquiry Into Counterfeit Electronic Parts in the DoD Supply Chain (PDF). http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfeit%20Electronic%20Parts.pdf http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...

gdubs 14y 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?

Estragon 14y 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.

toemetoch 14y 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/Counterfeit%20Electronic%20Parts.pdf http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...
- Estragon 14y 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.
  - mfukar 14y ago
    He needs to provide more specific information and evidence. Heed your own advice.
    - Estragon 14y ago
      I'm not the one making extraordinary claims.
DanBC 14y ago
He's an academic in England. Of course he's going to try to monetise his research.
- Estragon 14y ago
  That doesn't make it any less suspect.
14y ago

mvip 14y 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. :)

Zak 14y 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-investigation-method-apparatus/WO2012046029.html http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Integrated-circuit-inv...

tptacek 14y 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?
- Zak 14y 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.

kryptiskt 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
DanBC 14y 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 14y 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.

tptacek 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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).
  - wamatt 14y ago

unimpressive 14y 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.

cantankerous 14y 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 14y 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.

tptacek 14y 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.

Create 14y ago

If it is from Actel, then it is CMMI certified :) www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/SG_talk_BA.pdf

regularfry 14y ago
Yeah, there's enough info on the scan to figure out the part family.
- Create 14y ago
  ...its more fun than reading the keys (CB21 5DQ) from FLASH: Helion Technology Limited -- Helion Technology.

breck 14y 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 14y ago
So, 100% of the backdoors I've ever heard about were not kept secret, therefore backdoors are unlikely to be kept secret. :-)

raphman 14y 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/ http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/ [2] http://www.actel.com/documents/pa3_faq.html http://www.actel.com/documents/pa3_faq.html (I guess there is no real advantage in keeping this obscured)

femto 14y 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 14y 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 https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tamper.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tamper.html
- JL2010 14y 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

gouranga 14y 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 14y 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.
- wolf550e 14y 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".
  - Create 14y ago
    ...now you tell me. Political candidates should be required to sign the same stuff. And managers. And physicists. And PR stuntmen.
    - simonbrown 14y ago

spec_laconic 14y 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.

ballard 14y ago
Exactly my thought. It's simple enough to grab HN headlines, far harder to sustain attention without walking the walk. "It's not that I don't trust you, it's that I don't yet have necessary and sufficient evidence in relation to your claim to trust you."

regularfry 14y ago

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

liuming 14y 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.

DanBC 14y 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 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

epo 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
Hundreds of millions? You're off by about three orders of magnitude, there.

ChuckMcM 14y 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.

bbromhead 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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?

valugi 14y ago

1. you dont buy your military stuff from a potential enemy 2. US (and everybody) was (and probably still is) doing exactly the same. I do remember a scandal in the 80' concerning telephone systems sold behind the Iron Curtain by the US that could be kill remotely by an inner kill switch.

onto3622 14y ago

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

duckduckgouser 14y 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 14y 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 http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/tapo.shtml

codgercoder 14y 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 14y 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.

jianmeng 14y ago

This thing is unfair for the china telecom companys. China telecom is JUST working hard for the aims that everybody in the world can enjoy communicate with each other,even in the poorest country. This aim is good to internet span quick in developing country. That bring us a better internet environment to start business. If UK is affair of cheap telecom equipment from China, Just buy Ericsson's. So stop those rummor.

deepinit_arek 14y ago

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