Malicious Hardware Hacking May Be the Next Frontier

An anonymous reader writes "It's a given that hackers will target software, and that's enough for many people to worry about. But now there's the possibility that hackers would hide malicious code in the hardware itself. A hardware hack could be an annoyance, by stopping a mobile phone from functioning. Or it could be more dangerous, if it damages the way a critical system operates. Villasenor says there are several types of attacks. Broadly they would fall into two categories: one is when a block stops a chip from functioning, while the other involves shipping data out."

Article about it

[Black Parrot]

in the latest Scientific American, by the same guy.

Re:Uhhh...

[betterunixthanunix]

There is a good bit of research on this topic, actually. I think the idea with the "block that takes over functionality" is that it is perhaps simple enough (and thus lower performance) that inserting malicious functions into it would be difficult to do without being detected. So, for example, you might have a very high performance DSP block that can do a 1024 point FFT in a few clock cycles, but that is going to be a lot of logic and leaves a lot of places for a malicious manufacturer to hide something; your fallback if extra circuitry was detected would be a less complex FFT circuit that takes thousands of clock cycles to do the FFT, and which would be harder to tamper with. Detecting hardware that has been tampered with is pretty hard, though, and that is where a lot of the research is.

It is not just about outsourcing; a chip fab in this country might have a worker who is on the payroll of the Chinese government, and who tampers with a chip layout just prior to manufacturing. It is pretty expensive to run a secure chip fab, and even if all chip fabs were domestic, you would still have a number of important computers (think of utilities, critical services, etc.) being manufactured at facilities where the employees might be engaging in sabotage of this sort.