Imagine if the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could be effectively shut down by a foreign adversary with the flip of a switch? That’s, in part, the the concern behind the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Trust in Integrated Circuits program, reports IEEE Spectrum, in a fascinating article that explores the underbelly of national security and globalization:
Last September, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear installation in northeastern Syria. Among the many mysteries still surrounding that strike was the failure of a Syrian radar—supposedly state-of-the-art—to warn the Syrian military of the incoming assault. It wasn’t long before military and technology bloggers concluded that this was an incident of electronic warfare—and not just any kind.
Post after post speculated that the commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden “backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted the chips’ function and temporarily blocked the radar.
That same basic scenario is cropping up more frequently lately, and not just in the Middle East, where conspiracy theories abound. According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a “European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
At the heart of these concerns is something called a “kill switch”:
A kill switch or backdoor built into an encryption chip could have even more disastrous consequences. Today encoding and decoding classified messages is done completely by integrated circuit—no more Enigma machine with its levers and wheels. Most advanced encryption schemes rely on the difficulty that computers have in factoring numbers containing hundreds of digits; discovering a 512-bit type of encryption would take some machines up to 149 million years. Encryption that uses the same code or key to encrypt and decrypt information—as is often true—could easily be compromised by a kill switch or a backdoor. No matter what precautions are taken at the programming level to safeguard that key, one extra block of transistors could undo any amount of cryptography, says John East, CEO of Actel Corp., in Mountain View, Calif., which supplies military FPGAs.
Alternately, a kill switch might be programmed to simply shut down encryption chips in military radios; instead of scrambling the signals they transmit, the radios would send their messages in the clear, for anybody to pick up. “Just like we figured out how the Enigma machine worked in World War II,” says Stanford’s Adler, “one of our adversaries could in principle figure out how our electronic Enigma machines work and use that information to decode our classified communications.”
The DARPA program is about finding a way to vet chips, and determine which ones can be trusted.
By Sharon Weinberge
May 01, 2008 | 2:48:00 AM
(Shutting down cars or radar can be done even through satellites. The Russians have scalar wave technology that could just turn off any conventional military equipment based on microprocessors and electricity in a moment.
– The Infinite Unknown)