Fake Chinese microchips made to disarm U.S. missiles

Very interesting article about Chinese chips used in American missiles that may have been designed to disable American defenses.

Link

Why does this surprise me?

That's right, it doesn't.

Thanks for the heads up.

I can't for the life of me imagine why, in this global climate, we would be purchasing chips from an increasingly hostile country for anything more valuable than a Wal*Mart toy.

Who had the bright idea of having one of our potential enemies (super power) manufacture microchips for the weapons that are supposed to defend us from said enemy?

Sun Tzu must be laughing in his grave.

reply to post by Cryptonomicon


I spent ages verifying it when I read it. I couldn't believe America would be stupid enough to buy sensitive electronics from a potential enemy. Obviously I was wrong.

reply to post by Imhotepsol


This is, in part, what happens when you allow big corporations to dump all their labor to outside countries. While it kills our economy, it also poses risks from having to import all of our tech from outside. Even disregarding the risk posed in the OP, if it continues to increase, eventually all they'll have to do is cut us off to show us how they now own us.

If they want secure technologies, then they should spend the money to secure the production IN HOUSE, rather than waste it trying to catch a problem that might not even exist because they are allowing people they don't trust to do the production. Using my above point, this just helps accelerate their hold on us as we not only lose the ability to produce in the first place, but we also weaken ourselves further economically by trying to make sure that they aren't messing with the goods. The simple fact is, they definitely don't need to, but we have to check anyway. Physical war is becoming obsolete for the technologically advanced societies of the world...why waste time and manpower to threaten and kill your enemy when you can just take over their economy and rule them like slaves?

I can just imagine printed on the side of US missiles, "Made in China".

Not shocking at all either as a theory or in reality. Whoever the brainiacs were who shipped off the design and manufacturing of our weapons and defense systems to foreign countries (and the rest of our jobs too for that matter) should probably be summarily fired and tried for treason. But no, instead they're living high and laughing all the way to their safe havens in other countries as we get used to this brave new world we are vulnerable and exposed of every level and where technically we even build the very weapons that kill our own troops. Nice.

Take a peek at this if you're interested or have time and see how deep this really might all go with China: Chinese Unrestricted Warfare

Imagine what is in all the network equipment produced in China.

GM

reply to post by Dashdragon


I was having that exact same conversation with my girlfriend today.

With local manufacturing you may end up paying more for the goods but they're produced locally, providing jobs locally which means local people have more money to buy them with. It's no use to us having a wealth of cheap crap being imported when none of us have jobs or money to be able to purchase.

I'm all for micro-economies locally which sell the surplus they produce for trade. But have everything required for the community produced and sourced as close as possible.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


Nice find. I'm going to read that later.

Nice idea. Way too risky. If caught then serious ramifications.

Sounds like good old propaganda to me.

Oh, it's worse than you think.

Quite a few of the irreplaceable parts on the Really Neat Stuff the military uses every day of the week (and some they'll get AROUND to when it trickles down from the spook labs) are fabbed in Taiwan, at UMC and TSMC.

Right across the Formosa Strait, about 180km away from mainland China.

One good bombing run and Taiwan is off the air, which will put the hurt to whole categories of parts we depend on, militarily.

There are still a few companies that fab here in the US, Intel and TI come to mind, but a huge percentage of discrete semiconductors, low level logic and the cooler parts like big honkin' FPGAs are all, all made in Taiwan. No FPGAs, no Tomahawks. No F22s. No satellite replacements. Hell, the military uses FPGAs like popcorn. They love the damned things. It's hard to sell a fixed function board anymore to the military or various TLA's - if you don't plaster at least a $10,000 FPGA on it they think something's wrong. And with the exception of design test runs on small wafers, there is NO fab capacity outside of Taiwan for these things. No one can make them if Taiwan bites it. And China hates Taiwan. Don't think they aren't aware of this.

Even worse, with the exception of maybe one big military board supplier that runs a brokerage under the table, the guys that build these boards often depend on parts stocked in (drumroll) Hong Kong! We stock some here at distributors, but not a lot when they're $15K a whack. The board vendors don't want it on their inventory. The distys don't want it on THEIR inventory. The Harvard business wonks push JIT so the inventory doesn't show on the books, so where do the parts get buffered up? Yep. When TSMC has a glitch in the delivery date, they come from brokers in HK.Hell, WE do it, although only for prototypes and lab rat boards.

While the scary part of the article is supposed to be in the putative "spy chips", the real issue is more likely going to be the way that boards are speced and tested these days. The military has a mandate to buy "COTS", or commercial off the shelf boards. It used to be they required full MILspec on a lot of things, and you had to source US part manufacturers or show why, and you had to track every part on every board from birth to death. I could tell you what lot a part was made in, what date it was fabbed, and where the fab was done for every transistor or IC on every board. And if the lowest temp spec part on a board was 60C, that board was speced at less than 60C, whether it would sell better if I speced it at 80C or not, because that's the way you did it. If the parts dictated that a board was a certain temp range, that's what it was, plus some buffer.

But not anymore. Now the big guys will design boards where the part spec envelopes may be 0 - 60C. And they'll test a representative sample out of the run, maybe three boards, and if they pass -40 - 80C tests one time, bingo! That entire batch of boards is now good for -40 to 80C! Even if the individual part vendors don't concur. Here's where the fun starts. If the Chinese have slipped in some ringers that don't have any margin past 0 -60C, or if they don't even work that well at 60C, then your statistical lot-tested temp rating system falls apart. And since they don't track parts, vendors, or lots anymore...well, who KNOWS where those boards went?

We don't do lot rating. And we don't do magic temp specs. If the parts dictate the board is rated 0-60C, that's what it is. We'll test them for operation to a wider spec for you, but we let you know up front that's what's going on, and we test each and every board for something like 96 hours in an environment chamber that's banging back and forth between the lower and upper end. And we don't use broker parts.

You can't say that for many places. And that's why this is an issue. The "spy chip" thing is another issue entirely - the ripoff part market is a more pervasive problem.

reply to post by Bedlam


Lol how do you know so much about this?

mind=blown.

reply to post by Imhotepsol


Yea, that's the problem that the big-wigs don't choose to see or just don't care about. They are weakening the economy of their own country for the short term benefits of getting richer a little quicker. I agree with the poster that this is basically treason.

I work in information technology so this is a daily pet peeve of mine what with all the jobs in my field getting constantly shipped over to India, Brazil, etc. Sure the corp may save some bucks, but anyone who's ever talked to an overseas helpdesk can tell you that they aren't even getting what they paid for normally. When I used to work at the same level as them, the majority of my day was spent making up for their mistakes. Thankfully I'm now several tiers above them, but it took me getting laid off to find where I'm at now.

I'm not even sure what these people are thinking as I've seen executive clients excited about transferring their company HD overseas. This isn't the excitement over saving a few grand a year on their contract with 2x the agents either, but sincerely believing they were going to have 2-3 times the agents with the same technical capability or higher than what they were already getting - yea...I went straight from that craphole to a tier 3 job for a reason thanks. Thankfully our CSR for them was honest and actually cared, so they politely explained that they save so much money for a reason and it isn't just because of the country.

I will gladly vote for a President that will put some sort of high taxation on the outsourcing of this type and magnatude as we see today to the point where those fatcats with their golden parachutes are actually not only losing quality, but money as well. Hopefully it will come while we still have people here able to perform the work. It's no wonder our education system is in such a harsh decline...no reason for the kids to care about a lot of that stuff if there's no money or jobs for it when they can just blow all their time playing sports or trying to be 'gansta' for a free ride through life. Alas, I won't get started on sports though (esp college ones) as that's a whole rant in of itself.

So, going back to the point in the OP, really the whole point is...if you want chips you can trust, make them your damn self. Don't waste time and money basically reverse engineering each and every one as that's just ridiculous.

Same article, but I am reading something much different.

The chips turned out to be counterfeits from China, but it could have been even worse. Instead of crappy Chinese fakes being put into Navy weapons systems, the chips could have been hacked, able to shut off a missile in the event of war or lie around just waiting to malfunction.

Could have been are the key words. This article is nothing but speculation. And the original post here is misleading. Although I do agree that using those parts in missles is not wise.

Fishy Chips: Spies Want to Hack-Proof Circuits

Thanks OP for the info. - very alarming to say the least even without all the economic and personal ramifications other posters brought up. It's like the nano Trojan horse.

you put cheap Chinese crap in your weaponry?

once i admired your tech.
omg

reply to post by Dashdragon


I used to be a lead tech sales for a big software company. I remember there a lot of our developers jobs were farmed out to India and so on. In the end all of the software now for the most part is being provided by slave labor markets.

We thought the services end of it was pretty safe but then slowly our lead and territory development was taken from our offices here and farmed out to India. I used to get calls from my customers all the time complaining they were getting cold called by Indians called "Michael Jackson" or "Jack Duckworth" that didn't understand a word they were saying and kept my clients on the phone for 15 minutes while they ran through a check list.

In the end they'd pass on the "leads" and when we'd call the customer would be like "WTF i only told him we'd be looking into something to get him off the phone".

Capitalism has created a slave market and we're all being sold out to it. Slowly profits have become privatized while risk and loss have been made the burden of the public. This is happening to all of us regardless of the country we live in. Each one of us is being ripped off and feel fortunate to have work rather than being seriously p***ed off about how bad every ones getting it. All so some George Soros wanabe can take home a fat bonus on top of a paycheck per month that's probably equal to an entire departments yearly wage.

We need a system of commerce to operate between people, a way of trading goods and services back and forth without relying on bartering. What we don't need is capitalism or private control over corporations or the money supply.

Think of the world we'd have if patents and copy rights didn't apply. If people could just pick up an advance made by someone else and run with it. If communities could take decisions and bring to bare actions required for the betterment of their lives as needed instead of relying on private companies and bloated bureaucracies to provide.

I'm an idealist but still cynical enough to know it's not going to happen. We should do a lot of things, there's a lot of good ideas out there but mostly we just won't do anything about them. In 3 generations people will still be complaining about the crap we are today - its just a shame to think that all of the potential for advancement we have that we still cannot break out of petty differences and the concept of fixed ownership enough to take the steps necessary.

reply to post by Imhotepsol


ummm what you describe is not capitalism, you said yourself that profits are being privatised while losses are borne by the people. By definition we are not living in a capitalist world.

This is a symptom of something i see throughout the business world, a focus on short term profit at the expense of long term gains. Having been through the financial education system, i know that in finance courses students are basically taught that shareholders returns are the be all and end all of the business world. The focus is on the growth in profits, ensuring the share price is high and paying out as much in dividends as possible. LIsting a company basically throws good management out the window, and the focus is on issues that are external to the core business. MBA programs, i would assume, are worse given the attitudes i have seen from MBA's. There is little consideration of risk vs reward, and even less consideration of the needs of the company and customers long term.

Private companies, and those run by people who are generally not finance majors, show very different behaviour.

Combine this focus with the removal of risk from the system by govts through socialising losses and you have a system where, at the top end, it is all about short term profit. Dollars. No consideration of anything else. If these guys truly wanted to run their businesses properly they would be thinking long-term and about all stakeholders, not just the people the dividends are paid to. A lot of the outsourcing and offshoring we have seen will end in tears, and companies will eventually get back to basics (if they survive).

This thinking has also obviously infected the govt. It is unthinkable to have an economic and military rival manufacturing components for your military; this is simple common sense. However its all about the short-term $ and these idiots cant even comprehend the longer term ramifications of what they are doing. How is it possible that, with the giant US military budget, the US cannot manufacture its own components???

Originally posted by zvezdar
This thinking has also obviously infected the govt. It is unthinkable to have an economic and military rival manufacturing components for your military; this is simple common sense. However its all about the short-term $ and these idiots cant even comprehend the longer term ramifications of what they are doing. How is it possible that, with the giant US military budget, the US cannot manufacture its own components???

Well, the US used to prop up semiconductor companies so that they would continue to make parts in the US. There also used to be rules that required you to use US sourced parts, when they were enforced, the semi manufacturers kept fab lines in the US, at least for the mil parts. Now that it's all COTS, they do what they feel. A lot of the semi companies moved their fabs to Taiwan in the '80s when Japan was dumping cheap semiconductors in the US. Now we don't have any to speak of doing these sorts of parts.