Chinese knockoffs threaten US military machine...

[norty303]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ese-parts.html

[planters]

This is not surprising just depressing and infuriating. It's a wonder when the open market free for all will reach such a critical low that nationalism and xenophobia will cause a frighting protectionism. The quality of almost everything out of Wall Mart is so low now that I'm surprised when I get it home and it works at all. And with alternative sources being strangled out of the market I'm not surprised that the government also is unable to source reasonable alternative suppliers; domestic or international.

[Robin]

An interesting read from the Boffins at Cambridge:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/Silicon_scan_draft.pdf

The abstract:

"This paper is a short summary of the first real world detection of a backdoor in a military grade FPGA. Using an innovative patented technique we were able to detect and analyse in the first documented case of its kind, a backdoor inserted into the Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 chips. The backdoor was found to exist on the silicon itself, it was not present in any firmware loaded onto the chip. Using Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA), a technique pioneered by our sponsor, we were able to extract the secret key to activate the backdoor. This way an attacker can disable all the security on the chip, reprogram crypto and access keys, modify low-level silicon features, access unencrypted configuration bitstream or permanently damage the device. Clearly this means the device is wide open to intellectual property theft, fraud, re-programming as well as reverse engineering of the design which allows the introduction of a new backdoor or Trojan. Most concerning, it is not possible to patch the backdoor in chips already deployed, meaning those using this family of chips have to accept the fact it can be easily compromised or it will have to be physically replaced after a redesign of the silicon itself."

[dnar]

We are struggling to pass QC on our most complicated digital products.

Yes manufacturing is cheap, but at what cost?

[JohnYayas]

I bought a new toilet from lowes and the toilet seat broke before I could even sit on it. How crappy is that?

[dnar]

I bought a new toilet from lowes and the toilet seat broke before I could even sit on it. How crappy is that?

Did you try rebooting it?

[JohnYayas]

I reboxed it. That did the trick.

[dnar]

I reboxed it. That did the trick.

It could have a silicon level back-door in the FPGA.

[planters]

I bought a new toilet from lowes and the toilet seat broke before I could even sit on it. How crappy is that?

What were you doing with it when it broke?