Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors
en.itar-tass.com
en.itar-tass.com
It seems over time this will create some very interesting market dynamics and all sorts of "secure" clones of various technologies in different parts of the world.
This is the beginning of the real cyber wars.. When technology is so complicated you can only trust things you've built from scratch with your own two hands. And even then you might have created some massive back door that could be taken advantage of without you knowing.
Seems like the basis for a SciFi Movie.. :-)
And why would Russia not be afraid of the NSA, after all they are a prime target.
But even now that the Europeans are fully aware of being spied upon by the US, they can not do anything about it without hurting themselves in the process. Europeans are weaklings, and not willing to endure the smallest amount of pain, even to avoid bigger pain down the road.
That's not remotely a new state of affairs. Nor is it new for them -- Russia in particular -- to have very good reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
I'm guessing they're building a FAB to manufacture it locally. Not that big of a news, actually.
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTcyNjU
As a result of the effort, thousands of American calculators were disassembled and reassembled with Soviet cases and logos but American parts inside, so that Soviet bureaucrats thought they were using calculators made in the USSR. In reality, only a few calculators were made entirely in the USSR, and they were below the quality of American/Japanese/English calculators.
Intellectual freedom and capitalism are more of a gradient than categorical. China is another example of this. They have been successful in some of their R&D efforts despite not being a Western liberal democracy. China has in fact produced their own chips, even if they aren't as good as what Intel and AMD are capable of.
Someone even could _write_ a "safe" operating system. That's what NASA did (they worried about bugs, not security, but that doesn't matter much) for the space shuttle. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue132/92_Space_shut...:
"Since the computers are essential, NASA decided to use five identical computers in operation for critical periods like launch and landing. Four of the units operate together, and if one has a different result, it's presumed wrong and is "outvoted." The fifth computer is programmed separately from the other four and acts as a backup to prevent possible generic software errors from causing problems."
And, of course, for that application, you cannot have the "won't get a meaningful result" outcome often. That's why they made the effort to make that unlikely (http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)
Becuase of the extra effort needed, the resulting OS may lack features, though.
Here's an example with the Boeing 777 that uses separate architectures:
>The aircraft has triple redundant digital autopilot and flight director designed by Rockwell Collins. The BAE Systems (formerly Marconi Avionics) triple digital primary flight computers provide control limits and commands flight envelope protection. Each of the three primary flight computers contains three different and separate set of 32-bit microprocessors, Motorola, Intel and AMD, to manage the functions of fly-by-wire.
If I also remember correctly, subsequent backup auto pilot systems usually only do the basics, so they can't compare and contrast with the first main auto pilot system on a lot of different actions.
1. Byzantine fault tolerance
Does your system maintain functioning even in the face of arbitrary adversaries embedded in the system?
2. Homomorphic cryptography
Can you execute meaningful computations on untrusted computers such that someone with total physical control could not discern the nature of the data or the computations being run?
Both problems are monstrously hard, open problems. They both impose extremely large computational costs as well, albeit in different ways. It's doubtful that an agency will consider these cost effective barring some radical innovation.
Edit: It looks like the two other replies address the issue of "suppose I have one or more systems that might fail, but not in an adversarial way." Intelligence agencies do not like to make that assumption, and so what is fine for NASA may not suffice to answer your quandary. NASA may produce 3, 5, 7, or more identical computers which then operate via a voting protocol to act. Unfortunately, if one of those machines is compromised, so is the data on it, and I am not sure what proofs NASA has for the reliability of their system if the machine could be compromised to produce arbitrary output.
The issue with 2 is even if they can't get information an easy DOS attack is a useful and you can't tell which is correct. So, 3 manufactures protects you if 1 is working for the enemy but not 2.
Seriously though, the costs associated with building modern chips are ridiculous. So much so the much of the future R&D work is being done by consortiums of companies like Sematech, who literally have billions of member company and government dollars invested in development.
http://courses.umass.edu/comm342/taubin.html
["The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" is worth reading, better than the movie.]
I'm not claiming that things are better in China, but at least Chinese authorities gathering data would rarely matter to a European citizen.
It is true though that unlike today, Germany did have an actual terrorism problem in the 1970s.
(1) IP cores can be bought as "binaries with API", not as source. This is cheaper, but much harder to inspect.
(2) I think that "compiling"[1] the source to some fab's process is not completely automatic (they "recompile" or "handcode" some "functions" to optimize power usage or max frequency), so you need to verify the "binary" is faithful to your source, including on the analog level. Then you need to verify the manufactured chip is faithful to the tape out[2] you verified, as a 3d apparatus, not just the xray.