[Infowarrior] - The Hunt for the Kill Switch

[Richard Forno]

The Hunt for the Kill Switch
By Sally Adee
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6171

Last September, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear installation in
northeastern Syria. Among the many mysteries still surrounding that strike
was the failure of a Syrian radar—supposedly state-of-the-art—to warn the
Syrian military of the incoming assault. It wasn't long before military and
technology bloggers concluded that this was an incident of electronic
warfare—and not just any kind.

Post after post speculated that the commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors
in the Syrian radar might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden
“backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code to those chips, an
unknown antagonist had disrupted the chips' function and temporarily blocked
the radar.

That same basic scenario is cropping up more frequently lately, and not just
in the Middle East, where conspiracy theories abound. According to a U.S.
defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a “European chip
maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be
accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in
military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the
equipment fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a way to disable that
circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently,
but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense
contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about
the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

Feeding those dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer
controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly
complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter, can contain an “insane number” of chips, says one
semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from
other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And
tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The
dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United
States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like
China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.

Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most
ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will
underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details
about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits
program. The findings from the program could give the military—and defense
contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for
the F‑35—a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been
compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds
by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that
contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of
this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.

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http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6171