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Comment by briandon | Hacker News Reader

There are non-malicious reasons for designing in backdoors (debugging) but the manufacturer is based in the PRC, is subject to PRC laws and pressure, and the PRC government undoubtedly knows that the company supplies hardware to the US military. However benign the original motivation for creating the backdoor may have been, it's potentially bad news.

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There is no evidence this chip is being used by the military for sensitive tasks, it isn't even certified for those uses. It's just an off-the-shelf FPGA chip that was found to have a backdoor (requiring physical access!), likely for debug purposes. While that should certainly be a concern for many of the company's customers, it is not necessarily a national security crisis.

"There is no evidence this chip is being used by the military for sensitive tasks, it isn't even certified for those uses. "

Well just because it isn't certified, doesn't mean it can't be used to leverage oneself into sensitive devices. Cfr the Chrome attacks of a couple of days ago, where the exploit leveraged several small issues that by themselves weren't dangerous.

Of course, so could a paperclip.

Not evidence, but the product page indicates:

"In addition to supporting portable, consumer, industrial, communications and medical applications with commercial and industrial temperature devices, Actel also offers ProASIC3 FPGAs with specialized screening for automotive and military systems."

http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/

There seems to be a special variant of the chip for military use, hopefully without this 'debugging feature'.

"Specialized screening for automotive and military systems" means that they have done more extensive tests on otherwise identical chips.

As an example: for military chips they will certainly do every (non-destructive) test they know on every single device, say at elevated temperature with a little less than the minimum specified operating voltage... The test-devices themselves might cost $1M and be occuplied for oen hour per chip, hence they will charge you more for the final chip.

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