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Comment by luyu_wu | Hacker News Reader

Completely do not understand this play. We make money from selling consumer chips to China, possibly put backdoors in their laptops, and now we want to remove that? Makes 0 sense from an economic AND national security standpoint considering these are laptop chips the US is banning.

Huawei is already banned from selling, why would they kick the dead horse so to say.

If anyone has any ideas, genuinely please let me know! I'm curious.

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Random baseless speculation: intel and Qualcomm refused to add back doors as demanded by US government, probably because the companies believed they couldn’t stop China from finding out that they did. US gov said fine, no more sales. You can sell again when you add back doors.

This is actually highly credible and should not be downvoted.

Ptychographic X-ray laminography has come a long way and can image even the latest chips at the transistor level:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/xray-tech-lays-chip-secrets-bare

True, it requires a synchrotron (one of the few things that actually costs more than a chip fab), but China has those:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...

China might not be able to make bleeding-edge 2nm chips, but it has the equipment needed to expose any backdoors in them. Publicly, worldwide, with proof. That is an existential threat to any hardware manufacturer -- getting caught doing that is a bankruptcy-level event. Until recently they didn't have to be afraid of getting caught.

Being able to image chips at the gate level or better is a critical lever in fixing the balance of power between hardware manufacturers and their customers. It's why Bunnie Huang's work on IRIS is so important:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39657936

My speculation was a lot more simple: China can blackmail or bribe internal employees to disclose the back door. Significantly less expensive and easier

The backdoors (more often, bugdoors) are known only to a very, very small number of people at each company. People with security clearances.

Things like the Intel ME are what make this arrangement work. The fact that the ME exists is public knowledge; there is a huge team of engineers at Intel who are responsible for designing it. The flaw that lets you tickle it in just the right way can be added by and known to only one or two people.

Just this year a spectacular example of one of these bugdoors was revealed in Apple's mobile chips, where an EL1 (kernel) attacker could tickle an undocumented L2 cache debugging mechanism to elevate to hypervisor/bootloader (EL2, EL3) level, and completely bypass Pointer Authentication:

https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_wh...

This hardware bugdoor (CVE-2023-38606) was discovered only because it was used against security researchers who were good enough to capture a trace of exactly what it was doing. Otherwise we would never know. We got very lucky here; there's no telling how many more of these things go undiscovered.

>intel and Qualcomm refused to add back doors as demanded by US government,

Intel ME ? Qualcomm blobs ?

I'm gonna go with Occam's razor. There's no real goal here other than political pandering.

Political pandering? Or not giving tech to an arm of the CCP known to be accessing networks it helped build for mobile network?

Tech? You mean a CPU you can buy in any supermarket?

These are consumer-grade mobile and laptop chips. That are going into products that won't get sold in the US anyway. Oh, and other Chinese companies, that do sale their products in the US, like Lenovo or Oppo, can get these same chips no problem.

So all this is doing is harming Intel and Qualcomm, while incentivizing Huawei to invest even more in domestic chips.

Huawei is a private company, and there's no known case of it spying on mobile networks.

Political panda-ing

Maybe Huawei is used as a conduit for trade secret theft? Using the information they get from negotiations for Intel chips or whatever to funnel that stuff to Chinese companies?

might have to do with the increasing blatant Chinese military supply to russia - China Providing 90% of Chips Used in Russia, Despite Sanctions

https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-providing-90-of-chips-us...

> Despite Sanctions

What sanctions ? You do realize that US jurisdiction is in US and some vasal states.

And they revoke the license in US and basal states, isn't it?

Sanctions on Russia, it's in the article

"Russia had been forced to repeatedly establish new supply chains for acquiring chips. As sanctions disrupted existing smuggling routes, it had set up new ones, likening these outcomes to a game of “whack-a-mole”, that was frustrating for both Western governments as well as “supply-chain managers at Russian missile and drone factories”.

The biggest failure in enforcing the controls is not that Russia continues to have some success in smuggling — that’s not a surprise — but that China continues shamelessly to sell Russia so much via normal trade routes."

There is 0 reason for China to care about US sanctions. The US doesn't own China.

Well the US is making them care by punishing China with this move.

Yeah, but if the sanctions cut off Russia <- US import path, but then Russia and China established Russia <- China <- US import path, it makes some sense for the US to cut off the China <- US leg.

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