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Comment by wpdev_63 | Hacker News Reader

I really have little doubt that the Chinese are integrating their spy chips into computer hardware going to the big four or even the pentagon. It's probably how they stole the designs to the f-35[you know that plane that costs over a trillion dollars to develop]. It would catastrophic if apple knew or even acknowledges the possibility of the Chinese having a backdoor into their servers and would result in massive shift in policy[+profit].

The NSA has been known to intercept electronics in shipping and putting in their own specialized pcb board replacements with microphones, cameras, etc. and are _very_ hard to detect. Hell the Russian even went back to typewriters for security purposes[0]. It would be foolish to think that the Chinese/Russians aren't doing the same thing to us.

[0]:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/101...

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> you know that plane that costs over a trillion dollars to develop

From my understanding, it's the joint cost of the program over its projected lifetime over the next 50+ years. Not the cost of getting it up in the air.

I find it extremely hard to believe that China is inserting magic backdoor chips into all of our computer hardware. What's much more likely is that they were able to bribe or threaten some engineers into giving information away. That's been a common tactic since spying became a thing.

Doesn't even have to be an engineer. You gather intelligence wherever you can. The Chinese are at least as smart as I am, and for me, the guy who runs the xerox machine or cleans the office will do nicely, thank you very much. I don't need some high powered engineer. So I'm almost positive they don't either.

It seems like putting magical chips into computers is one of the most difficult methods of acquiring what at the root would be the same intelligence.

This[0] is a backdoor that was discovered _only_ through reading patents on the chip. It gave the highest possible privilege(ring -4) to the user by simply running an undocumented cpu register. It would be incredibly easy to hide something like this within one of the 100 of thousands of computers that go to the big 4 or even the pentagon.

I'd imagine people at the pentagon select randomly from a number of computers coming in and do some chip analysis like this[1] but I can only speculate and they probably can't stop all the hardware backdoors this way.

Anybody that would be caught disclosing highly classified information would probably be found and promptly hanged(or get in some sort of freak car accident). They probably have some serious counterintelligence to catch the leaks. Once again I am only speculating.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eSAF_qT_FY [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4aF-qiziM

The existence of the Via C3 "backdoor" was actually documented in the official datasheet, along with the correct MSR bit to enable/disable it. See page A-10 in appendix A: http://datasheets.chipdb.org/VIA/Nehemiah/VIA%20C3%20Nehemia... Apparently the researchers either couldn't find a copy or didn't notice that part.

Do you think it’s really that hard to phish a defense contractor or hack them? Huge threat surface: mediocre OPSEC, lots of layers not involved but with access, and really bad SharePoint discipline. If I had to guess, most of their “cyber” is being sold, not used internally.

Why would you burn a hardware hack like that for plans?

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