FBI Says Military Had Counterfeit Cisco Routers 186
There are new developments in the case of the counterfeit Cisco routers, which we have been discussing for some time. The NYTimes updates the story after an FBI PowerPoint presentation made its way onto the Web. It seems that experts at Cisco have examined some of the counterfeit routers in detail and proclaimed that they contain no back doors. Others don't believe we can be so sure. "Last month, [DARPA] began distributing chips with hidden Trojan horse circuitry to military contractors who are participating in the agency's Trusted Integrated Circuits program. The goal is to test forensic techniques for finding hidden electronic trap doors, which can be maddeningly elusive... The threat was demonstrated in April when a team of computer scientists from the University of Illinois presented a paper at a technical conference in San Francisco detailing how they had modified a Sun Microsystems SPARC microprocessor... The researchers were able to create a stealth system that would allow them to automatically log in to a computer and steal passwords."
Not a big surprise. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And outsourcing.... (Score:5, Informative)
Selling out the back door (Score:5, Informative)
That said, it's pretty low on the list of likely threats. Pretty hard to know exactly what gear will be placed where and what it will give you access to. Plus even with a back door, places with sensitive data are more likely to be monitoring the traffic which is harder to hide.
Technical details of malicious hardware (Score:5, Informative)
-- computer scientists from University of Illinois
Re:And outsourcing.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:free software distributes the effort. (Score:1, Informative)
Not counting the one you're replying to, he's already posted in this article with two [slashdot.org] other [slashdot.org] accounts, so YOU WILL hear him out, or else. He's probably compensated on a per-post, per-account basis.
At heart, twitter is really a xenophobe, and his "Communist China is evil" argument is an old one.
Re:"Counterfeit" not an issue... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An Evil Competitor. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And outsourcing.... (Score:3, Informative)
SONET, DS3, and DSUs in any quantity can be purchased for a computer without a problem. When you get into the terabit range you still have a lot of options.
For switching Cisco makes zero sense, HP gives you higher through-put for less money and they aren't the only ones. Let the router do the routing and the switch can do the switching.
The only reason Layer 3 and 4 switches are becoming commonplace is because routers get more and more expensive the higher up the stack you go. There is nothing worse than using a wire-speed layer 3 switch which is undergoing a heavy load from file transfers as a central routing gateway. Especially when you get into BGP and OSPF.
Terabit backplanes are nothing new though, easily achieved through distributed computing and for far less money.
Re:An Evil Competitor. (Score:3, Informative)
You know twitter, my dad and his brothers lived through Argentina's "Dirty War". I didn't really understand what they went through until I was a little older and he asked me to play (and pay attention to) one of his old LP records. It's amazing how a simple song will open our eyes to things you can't grasp when they are explained in other ways. If you ever have a chance to listen to "Yo Te Nombro" (would translate roughly to "I Say Your Name") by Nacha Guevara [wikipedia.org], do take the opportunity to do so. It's a powerful statement of all the things you lose (the most important of which is your own humanity) in an environment of total and complete repression.
I doubt you will ever stop humping the "I hate M$" horse, but maybe what you need is to have some sense of measure when you talk about what a horrible place the US has become now that the RIAA can search your computer, just so you can make a point about your racially-charged dislike of China, which I assume is no different from the one you've displayed in the past towards India and other countries.