Hunt for the kill switch in microchips

Rather than worry about the seemingly unlikely mysterious "malicious kill switches", the DOD should be far, far more worried about the reportedly tremendous number of fake ICs available on the market. I've been told by chip manufacturers that the situation is pretty grim and such chips are being cranked out in astonishing numbers.

A fighter jet is much more likely to nosedive into the dirt because some perfectly good code or I/O that works fine in a genuine chip goes all wonky in these bogus chips. Heck, our own code & hardware isn't terribly complex and we have enough trouble getting consistent performance from various silicon revs of authentic ICs, even with the aid of the manufacturers. I can't begin to imagine how many catastrophic problems these fake chips could introduce.

I'm not necessarily arguing for bringing back all IC production back to the West, although that's a pretty tempting option. We can't (well, won't) strong-arm governments to crack down on this and certainly they have no interst in policing themselves.

I'm not even sure that option is even abailable anymore. At this point I'd be surprised if IC manufacturers aren't afraid to even try such a thing, lest they face vindictive reprecussions from the governments currently hosting much of their fab labs. Even a temporary loss of production from those facilites might be unacceptably or fatally costly to some manufacturers.

America paranoid...shurely not!

Don't tell but my solar panels are really satelite knock out dishes and my garden pond is a cooling pond for my secret nuclear facility...
Slaps furry head with paw.

Del....(Hmmm maybe I shouldn't have said that stuff...do I hear an incoming fighter jet?)

Whew this edit facility is good...

Psssstt. Hey, you. Yeah...you. Come 'ere a second.

Notice how I typed "abailable"? That wasn't a typo. Nope. It's an anagram. A secret one.

It really means "Le Alibaba". A little shout out to my Asian cohorts. Shhhhh. Don't tell the Feds.

Interesting article, and perhaps more true than commonly realised.

<"She told me, "I think interviewed every electrical engineer in the country so I could wrap my head around..">

Talk about journalistic exaggeration, because there must be many tens of thousands of Electrical Engineers in the US.

How many of those Electrical Engineers in the US did she actually interview?

But, as always, the truth does not stand in the way of a story which sells.

Kind Regards....

And an 'Electrical Engineer' would know SFA about what's in a chip...

Maybe an 'Electronics Engineer' would...that's a good illustration of how Engineering is misunderstood by the public.

Hum, gee Blue Screen of Death, they already have the codes but they fear their own security? No that's not it. They could just order off codes that were more complex.

Wonder what all the BS is about? Maybe security reliability issues of foreign chips. That makes some more sense but why all the indirect PR?

Brad

If you live by the sword, You die by the sword.

If you live by the silicone, You die by the silicone.

If you are old enough to remember 30yr old Motorola "6800" micorporcessor, did you ever bump into the "HALT AND CATCH FIRE" (our humorous name for it at that time) instruction.

The hex instruction byte "D9" was a bogous instruction that would load the accumulator from the address pointed to by the index register and increment the index register but the program counter would not advance. Actually nothing caught on fire.

Therefore the index register looped over and over and the program counter never changed untill you turned the power off.