Chip Backdoors: Assessing the Threat

Very true, and I often do.

What I find so troubling is why more people don't complain more often, we need sufficient complainers to reach critical mass and so often that's not the case. Take another such matter - the unreasonableness and unfairness of current international copyright law. It is this way and will likely remain so for a long time simply—as Cory Doctorow who regularly writes on such matters says 'the whingers and complainers are far too few in number to make any difference, they're just irrelevant noise in the political debate [note: that's my phraseology of his actual quote]. The fact is the average person couldn't give a damn about copyright law.

Same goes for many other important issues, especially surveillance capitalism! Yes, here many are aware of the fact and they actually care about it but in the yin and yang battle between surveillance capitalism and users' worry that they're under surveillance and the 'good feelings' generated by Google's and Facebook's 'free' apps then every time those apps win out by miles!

Correct, these surveillance capitalism bastards use their sophisticated knowledge of human psychology to ensure that the balance is always in their favor. (Remember, this is an age-old trick, the emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum to distract the minds of Roman citizens from local troubles.)

Tragically, our governments have done precious little to correct the problem - and again much of that can be put down to the millions of dollars Big Tech spends on lobbying governments. We citizens are seemingly always on the the losing end when big money is involved.

...But as an individual you can do something about it. Your efforts may be small and they might only benefit you but they're not nought. Only yesterday in reply to the HN story Making Quieter Technology I wrote a badly-written long-winded reply† to show how one could tackle the problem of surveillance capitalism: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32383493. Bad it may be but my efforts count for something more than just zero.

...the pile with the various environmental apocalypses and global resurgence of authoritarianism.

Can't agree more. For me, the resurgence of authoritarianism is the more important of the two, for without citizen autonomy we've little or no control over environmental apocalypses let alone the many other existing worldwide problems; in effect authoritarianism neuters us.

Depressing yes, but every little tweak helps (especially so if everyone's doing it).

D:< & >:(

__

† Yes, my reply was long because it included specific actions but it was not long enough to do a good job, a blog would have been a better approach. Unfortunately, as good as 'HN comments' is, it isn't an ideal place to do this.

You're correct, it is worrying but sometimes it's inevitable. Moreover it's worse when governments get involved.

In my case I've signed documents that strictly limit me from being explicit.

That allowed an electronics engineer to make detailed comparisons between many alternatives before buying any samples and it also allowed the creation of many designs where the components where used for purposes that were very different from anything imagined by their vendors.

Already after 1990, but especially after 2000, the amount of technical documentation about hardware components that is available freely has dropped dramatically and now for most of the more complex hardware components it is possible to obtain enough information to make a design only after signing non-disclosure agreements.

This fashion of the NDA's has made it very difficult to create really innovative products or new competitors in an existing market.

For a company already established in a market, which only does new versions of old products, obtaining the documentation under NDA is trivial.

On the other hand, for designing an innovative product, obtaining the documentation is very hard.

One reason is that there is a vicious circle, until you have all the documentation, you cannot know which is the component that is suitable for your design, so you cannot commit to buy it, but many companies will not provide the documentation before you can convince them that you are committed to buy quantities large enough of that component.

Even the documentation obtained under NDA is usually much less complete than what could be obtained freely a few decades ago, so not only it is impossible to determine whether the component could be used for any other purpose than that specified by the vendor, but usually the documentation is not complete enough to determine with certainty that even the intended purpose can be accomplished.

Because of that, in most hardware projects a series of tests on prototype boards are absolutely necessary to fill the gaps in the technical documentation provided by the vendor.

So very frequently many designers have to duplicate the work of others in discovering workarounds for the bugs or lower performance than expected of various components, because even if they would want to share their experiences, they are prevented by the NDA's that they have signed.

Unfortunately, being not allowed to talk about various technical facts, without any good reason to forbid this, has become a pervasive policy.

We’re talking about GDSII files passed around on USB sticks in Chinese factories. Of course there’s blackbox IP on some chips in the wild.

Despite my earlier comments, I think your point is essentially correct - at least it's so when it comes to what we normally consider as criminal behavior. However, that's not necessarily the case when it comes to manufacturers and or state actors who have the power to force manufacturers to secretly install backdoors into chips.

Take the case of Huawei and the ban certain countries have placed on telco carriers using its telecommunications equipment. I'm not privy to the reasons as to why certain governments have banned Huawei but one doesn't have to be Einstein to read between the lines in that it would be almost impossible to check every chip in imported Huawei switches (even if it were practicably feasible (which is doubtful) then any such checking would make the normally-competitive Huawei considerably more expensive for telcos to install than if they were to purchase from its competitors).

Huawei is and has been on a solid push to develop its own technologies, to quote Wiki "Meanwhile, it was reverse-engineering imported switches and investing heavily in research and development to manufacture its own technologies". With the support, authority and might of the Chinese Government it's not hard to imagine that a chip with a backdoor could be implanted in such equipment. Moreover, this may not happen immediately but rather some years later after an innocuous maintenance fix long after all the original brouhaha had died down.

I must admit the strange and seemingly irrational behavior of many—and that includes some governments—during the COVID pandemic has radically altered my perception of humanity. My views are now much less sanguine and much more angst-ridden.

Moreover, humanity now seems more hyped and irrational than it once was. During the Cold War MAD by some 'miracle' kept the world safe, if exactly the same situation prevailed today I much doubt that it would.

The reasons? ...Well that's for another time.

Scientific paper about using infrared imaging (the rays can reach under the skin) to detect silent speech/inner speech.

Replicating this and using it to show people their inner speech can be stolen would bring awareness to possible surveillance.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27801867/