For years, everyone has warned that counterfeit microchips made in China and installed on American military hardware could contain viruses or secret backdoors granting the Chinese military cyber access to U.S. weapons systems. These warnings/predictions recently expanded beyond counterfeit parts, now we're worried that any Chinese-made components could be infected. The problem was that until this week, these warnings were educated guesses and theories. Well, a scientist at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom claims to have developed a software program proving that China -- and anyone else -- can, and is, installing cyber backdoors on some of the world's most secure, "military grade" microchips.
Specifically, the American-designed, Chinese-made Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 A3P250 -- commonly known as the PA3 -- chip was found by Cambridge researcher, Sergei Skorobogatov, to have a backdoor, or trojan, deliberately built into it. The PA3 is what's called a Field Reprogrammable Gate Array (FRGA); an almost blank slate of a microchip that can be programmed by its owner to perform a variety of tasks.
Most alarming is that the PA3 is considered to be one of the "most impenetrable" designs on the market. The chip is used in military "weapons, guidance, flight control, networking and communications" hardware, according to Skorobogatov's report on his findings that was published last weekend. The PA3 is also used in civilian "nuclear power plants, power distribution, aerospace, aviation, public transport and automotive products," according to Skorobogatov.
(In an example of just how military-grade these chips are supposed to be, the image above is actually taken from Actel/Microsemi's promotional material for the PA3)
Basically, Chinese cyber spies can gain use the chip's built-in malware to decipher military passcodes and gain remote access to the chip and reprogram it to do their bidding; "permitting a new and disturbing possibility of a large-scale Stuxnet-type attack via a network or the Internet on the silicon itself," reads his report.
The worst part, this backdoor, installed on chips used on critical weapons systems and public infrastructure around the word, is almost impossible to remove from the chip since, well, it was built into the device during manufacturing. That mean's you can't just issue a software patch to repair the vulnerability.
The backdoor is close to impossible to fix on chips already deployed because, unlike software bugs in a PC Operating System, you cannot issue a patch to fix this. Instead one has to replace all the hardware which could be extremely expensive. It may simply be a matter of time before this backdoor opportunity, which has the potential to impact on many critical systems, isexploited.Having a security related backdoor on a silicon chip jeopardises any efforts of adding software level protection. This is because an attacker can use the underlying hardware to circumvent the software countermeasures.
So uh yeah, this stuff is everywhere. When people warn of the potential for widespread disruption from cyber espionage and warfare, they're not just crying wolf. Makes you feel safe, huh?
Here's Skorobogatov's full report where you'll learn how the backdoors are installed and activated.
