pcb's today contain too much 'made by hand' to hide much without the designer noticing...
It would be like photoshop trying to sneak extra people into photos without the photographer noticing.
It would be like photoshop trying to sneak extra people into photos without the photographer noticing.
Doesn't mean the layers have to be rendered with the modified/malicious version of KiCAD. They could just try to hide it if they detect a layer with id=spyware.
I'm just saying that this would be a very sneaky way to infiltrate the hardware industry, because currently all installed versions rely on the old domain - and that's where they will pull their updates from, too. So pushing out a newer release with that "spyware" modification would be super easy to realize.
What I thought of is maybe it might be feasible to sneak in some circuits that reroute e.g. a network port's traffic to a specific public IP/CnC. Depending on how complex the PCB layout is, it could be feasible to encode or modify the modulation of easy network busses (aside from ethernet).
But I guess that would involve deployment of malicious firmware or availability of a specific "malicious" chipset, too, because ethernet is quite complex in the sense that there are too many physical parts necessary to implement it in hardware form.
I was just thinking about the Q&A pipelines in the industrial process. Usually they never validate anything because of proprietary/protected intellectual property contracts, so suppliers down the line always claim it's according to specifications and that is blindly trusted by the manufacturers.
Identifying something like this is much harder in the organizational sense, because it involves a lot of time for verification down the line, and involves a lot of organizational blamestorm before anything really happens to fix it.
Despite this, I very much doubt any software is going to be inserting those into designs automatically anytime soon!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Blanket automated modifying of hardware designs to add "spyware in hardware form"? I would say even "automated" part is impossible at the moment. I've never heard of automation that would understand a hardware design on a level that would be required for that.
In the end, the only modification with a good chance of being missed by the designer is the copper artwork on existing PCB layers. You might add an extra trace, or break an existing trace somewhere. But as soon as your hacked Kicad starts adding BOM items (like an extra "spyware" microprocessor or something) or even extra layers, I guarantee someone is going to notice very soon. If not for other reasons then because these things will add extra $ on someone's bill.
Actually adding a component is a bit too james bond, although maybe you could do 1 or 2 on some enormous board but even then that's a real stretch.
More and more manufacturers with online ordering show you images of what they think each layer looks like, and any modifications unless they are very slight will be detected then. You always review each layer in the manufacturers tool as there is a host of things that can go wrong (layer ordering, mirroring, alignment, copper vs solder mask vs silkscreen layer types).
Adding extra components is out too, as the Bill of Materials is exported to CSV, then imported into several component suppliers websites. Any non-basic component is carefully scrutinized for need as they are expensive (and these days hard to get) and to make sure you have everything you need to actually build the board as any non-trivial board requires multiple suppliers to provide all of the components. Even if you missed it then, assembly charges a significant amount per unique component they have to place on the board (eg: placing same resistor twice is cheaper than 2 different resistors).
Once the board is assembled, it will then likely undergo EMI testing to comply with various countries limits on how much RF can leak out of the product. In quite a few cases, final testing is done by a 3rd party lab. This basically limits whatever data exfiltration method to be short range.
If someone wanted to be evil, they would have much better luck on the software side of the product rather than at the board level.