A close reading of this article leads me to believe they are talking about a common micro-controller chip here. These chips power things like cell phones, microwave ovens, anti-lock brake systems...and most everything else these days.
They speak of a weakness in the chips encryption. I believe they are saying the code-protection feature is weak. When you program a controller chip and wish to protect your work you set a hardware flag that makes it impossible to read out the firmware by normal means.
There are companies that will open the chip and break the protection by physical means. But this story is about the manufacturer leaving in an easier way to get at the protected code.
from the article
“the chip in question is widely used in military and industrial applications. The “backdoor” means it is “wide open to intellectual property theft, fraud and reverse engineering of the design to allow the introduction of a backdoor or Trojan”, they said”
This statement is what leads me to believe they are speaking of a weak code-protection system on the chip.
This does not mean the chip can be re-programmed remotely. That ability is added by what is known as bootloader code in the chip. They don’t mention any such thing here.
Nearly all controller chips can be erased even if the code-protect flag is set. Then you can re-program the chip with new code. You could pay to have the protection of one chip physically defeated and get a copy of the firmware. Then you could simply erase the flash memory on any number of identical chips and re-program with code that has the original functionality and whatever added features you wish.(even bootloader code)
What I am saying is it would only be a little bit tougher to get at the firmware on a properly protected controller and then modify that firmware for nefarious purposes. The code-protect feature is merely a speedbump...that is all.
IMO some of the hardware geeks at this company just wanted a way to peek at whatever code these chips were ever programmed with...nothing more.
This is probably a licensed ARM variant of some type.
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