[mdlug] [Fwd: [opensuse-offtopic] And now the Manchurian microchip]

[David Lane]

If you have a firewall then you can track all in and outbound connections. 

David C. Lane




________________________________
From: "Ingles, Raymond" <Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com>
To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 1:17:30 PM
Subject: Re: [mdlug] [Fwd: [opensuse-offtopic] And now the Manchurian microchip]

> From: Aaron Kulkis
> The myth: Chinese intelligence services have concealed a microchip in
> every computer everywhere, programmed to "call home" if and when
> activated.
> 
> The reality: It may actually be true.

That's hard but not impossible to do. Most OS's today rely on the chip
to protect memory in hardware, and tell the OS if some rogue program
tries to alter or read memory it doesn't own. If there's a way to tweak
the hardware so that a program can tell the OS - perhaps by an illegal
opcode - to temporarily 'turn off' that memory protection, then the
program can do pretty much whatever it wants.

Tweaking the hardware to do something like this is difficult, though.
Consider: the evil plant gets the design for the chip, and then has to
modify those designs to insert a deliberate flaw, without introducing
bugs the customer will detect. Considering how 'close to the edge' these
sorts of designs generally are - the designers have every economic
incentive to try to use every square nanometer they can - that's no mean
feat. If the plant makes a mistake in the malicious modifications the
yield will go way down, quite possibly to zero.

Some CPU bugs can be used this way already, see here:
http://nchovy.kr/uploads/3/303/D2T1%20-%20Kris%20Kaspersky%20-%20Remote%
20Code%20Execution%20Through%20Intel%20CPU%20Bugs.pdf

> "It is the hottest topic concerning the FBI and the Pentagon," a
retired
> intelligence official told The Investigator. "They don't know quite
what
> to do about it. The Chinese have even been able to hack into the
> computer system that handles our Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
> system."

There's no reason given in the article to assume the Chinese used
hardware trojans to accomplish this, though. There may well be such
reasons, but given how lax plain old software security can be, I would
not be at all surprised if they used a more mundane flaw.

Sincerely,

Ray Ingles                                        (313) 227-2317

"The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In
            theory, it can't possibly work." - G. Owen
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