Since Supermicro mother boards are selling everywhere, it should be very easy to find one such board and take a picture right?
What's more, they didn't just keep quiet, they made very strong public denials, the kind that would result in SEC and shareholder lawsuits if they were proven to be false.
Contrast this to a public showing of anger against the NSA which is beneficial to the company and to the NSA. The NSA wants users to feel secure and not take other measures.
Shareholders can sue for anything (everything is securities fraud), the act of exposing client details to the NSA without telling shareholders is no less problematic than continuing to lie to shareholders about dealings with the NSA.
I mean, honestly, hats off if that's the case. That would be pretty cool. But you need actual evidence for such a tale.
That's pretty much it (if the story is not bullshit). That, or cooperation from Supermicro or whoever was their distributor to the target.
I'm not sure why you're implying that you need a super-spy to pull this off. If this was done at the factory level they likely had access to the same manufacturing equipment used to make the motherboards, so there's no need to manually solder anything. The implant was alleged to be a surface-mount component so it could be as simple as reprogramming the pick-and-place machine or swaping out the reels. Given that this is china enlisting a couple of technicians to your cause wouldn't be too hard[1]. From there once they figure out a particular order is going to a juicy target they can ship the bugged boards in place of the untampered boards.
> But you need actual evidence for such a tale.
Agreed. My main takeway from the article is that this hack could happen, not necessarily that it has happened.
[1] it's not unlike the concerns that there are NSA backdoors in intel cpus (eg. AMT/vpro, or RDRAND), or windows (NSAKEY).
The factory doesn't have assembly lines marked like 'for apple', 'for the nsa'. It's just an assembly line making a bunch of identical boards. You'd have to identify a specific board way after it's left the assembly line, and probably after being integrated into a chassis to put your spy chip on it if it's targeted at a specific customer.
2. Wait for an order from apple
3. Add the bugged boards
If the warehouses and manufacturing lines are all in China (as is the case with just in time manufacturing) I don't see why this is difficult to pull off.
Is that not how it works? If so, I'd like to know why.
It's not some giant leap of the imagination.
Nope, if you read the original article the chip is much simpler than what you described.
>the primary role of implants such as these is to open doors that other attackers can go through. [...] In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people familiar with the chips’ operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of the operating system were being stored in the board’s temporary memory en route to the server’s central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the order of the instructions the CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create disastrous effects.