US Navy Bought Fake Chinese Chips, Questions Security of Sourcing

Title is wrong. Somebody needs to learn to parse journalistic hype with a little more skepticism.

"The chips turned out to be counterfeits from China, but it could have been even worse. Instead of crappy Chinese fakes being put into Navy weapons systems, the chips could have been hacked, able to shut off a missile in the event of war or lie around just waiting to malfunction."

This isn't the first time this has happened, I remember when it was discovered in 2008 that a ton of POS card reader/pin payment machines were sending stolen data back to servers and it was built into (or sabotaged into) the machines themselves from the manufacturer (or intercepted by pirates along the way). Seems like now is a great time to get into the hardware supply chain security/QA verification business.

And how feasible is it to obfuscate the design purpose and logic of chips at manufacture as they propose in the article?