Second, would have it been cheaper to manufacture somewhere more trustworthy (another country?) instead of spending all this time/money on your anti-hack systems?
Also, we were basically locked in due to the magnitude of investment in the software we have developed for the device.
Fortunately this only lasted for few months until it was dealt with. It was quite new back then (a decade ago) and it was a surprise for everybody I guess.
I'd like to know this too. Has the West completely lost the ability to mass produce microchips at even a reasonable cost for financial applications?
But I'd guess momentum is hard to change.
They will never do that, because they look for the cheapest solution.
The bigger the company, the less it cares about things other than cost. This is why Mediatek and Broadcom can usurp the market of network SoCs, while making products with atrociously bad support. I personally dealt with both, and say that they wholely match their popular culture image.
I don't know how it is with USA, but for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres, for as long as they get them made inside the country.
I don’t know if any companies do PCB manufacturing and assembly outside of China in large numbers.
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3014651/sonys-penc...
Well, if your chips are bigger and slower, you will need more chips and mounts/packaging to place them. If you need more chips then the weight of missile/plane/tank will be increased and available space decreased.
So at the end, the 'uncaring' military will receive a weapon which is worse than competition.
All thanks to an outdated chip.
It's the unknown unknowns that get you.
at first I had the same thought. but i have to question how securely the same manufacturing could be done in a US plant.
the US employee base has its fair share of desperate, ethically challenged individuals. and plenty of incentives to make a quick buck could be offered here too. idk.
OTOH, given US law enforcement's low efficiency what are the chances of being caught? and what if it's merely corporate espionage?
finally, the US is an open society with strong personal freedom guarantees builtin. what if the perpetrator has ties to a foreign country and simply leaves the US after they've installed the vulnerabilities?
Due to requirements we opted to have the only large meeting room to have outside our secure zone. This created an issue as we had no network access from there and in the end we decided to use slow GPRS terminal for the test.
The end-to-end test starts with offline transactions which by their very nature are quite fast (it is negotiated between terminal and card).
But then we went to online transaction and it finished instantly too.
The auditor, bewildered, proclaimed the test failed as he assumed it was incorrectly processed offline instead of going online. But then I pointed out to the printout to show ARQC (basically says it was certified online).
Now, the real discussion started. The terminal was very slow taking quite few seconds to establish GPRS and then even more for the SSL handshake so the auditor said it was not possible to make it work.
How it worked was that I have completely gutted OpenSSL and had entire cryptographic state stored locally (safely, using internal HSM) so the SSL session could be optimistically re-established without another handshake even after TCP connection was closed. The first message the terminal sends is already encrypted transaction message, there is no SSL handshake. I wrote an application to terminate the connection in our data center so that it stored the states of each connection in the database. The entire handshake was only done if the first message could not be decrypted successfully.
The operating system was single-threaded with no multitasking of any kind. This meant that all applications on this device did their operations sequentially. Send network message, print something, display something, etc.
I wrote a cooperative multitasking functionality into the application (using coroutines) so that it could work on multiple tasks at the same time (like talking to network and printing).
I then have segregated all data on the printouts so that it can start printing without having to already have response from network. Hopefully if everything went right, the response would come before it even came to that place on the printout effectively looking as if it was done in zero time.
But am I wrong to have my hackles raised by a) the roll-your-own security nature of this, b) the reliance on a single developer's single stack implementation as what guarantees the integrity of the system? It seems like there are a lot of assumptions baked in.
I, too, would love to see a more detailed write-up--if there's a big idea here (almost a unikernel thought), it deserves to be shared and tried by fire.
quote captures the human element playing strong in face of bad system
If the device is sealed with an anti-tampering system then the contents must be checked by a trusted entity before being sealed.
Trying to guess the contents of a box that you cannot open sounds a bit like madness.
Use X-ray? or whatever can penetrate the exterior shell
The more critical the field, the more you have to treat those devices as untrusted before attaching them to your trusted zone.
Basically, any device brought to the US and a number of other countries are issued for one-time use; if they leave our custody for even an instant, they are to be scrapped.
Given how sophisticated these attacks can be, I'd think they'd issue disposable equipment to be destroyed on return, like a cheap netbook or something. I don't see how you could trust an individual viewing a simple X-ray scan to detect some extra microchip the size of a signal conditioning coupler.
Then again many companies or public institutions would find it hard to justify shredding each week maybe tens of laptops and phones that still have to be good enough to work on. Basically they still have to be a "standard issue" device with your company's software stack, config, etc.
I'm sure someone can find a good compromise between security and wastefulness.
But it's useful to know when/if you're being targeted.
> We would be getting products from China with added boards to beam credit card information.
>> Trying to guess the contents of a box that you cannot open sounds a bit like madness.
>>> Use X-ray? or whatever can penetrate the exterior shell
2 different types of attacks, 2 different types of responses.
From what I understand, Boeing does this when employees visit France.
They have had problems with men in nice suits going through laptops stored hotel safes.
But I think the GP's question is: "Whether it would be cheaper" - in the sense whether such an expensive QA process could have been averted by having a more trustworthy partner. One whom you're not on a race hack after hack.
You cannot just trust the word of a contractor on this because it's your ass on the line.
As I hinted in another comment I suspect that they had a suspicion and checked those motherboards very, very carefully.