Posted on 05/15/2008 5:03:00 PM PDT by ricks_place
“But it’s the corporates that are giving their secrets to China. A bottom line increase in a quarter is seen as more important than any of those silly trade secrets. “
In some cases yes, because in some cases the people making those decisions have interests in other countries, no morals, or are greedy. Profit this quarter are the only important thing, besides their bonuses of course.
Many countries have very active efforts to capture US trade secrets and technology. Its not only military technology, but food technology, chemicals, materials, processes and so forth.
One example is the knowledge it takes to implement complex information systems. Methodologies that took many years to develop at untold cost are available for anyone to download.
The very IT security standards recommended for banks, government, health are other examples of whats available for download. We are giving away our economic and technical advantages.
It could copy all manner of information gathered on the network and send it back out on the wire to a designated receiver controlled by the PLA, for starters. You could put enough logic onto an commodity ethernet chip now to do a wide variety of very nice things.
Think about it this way: many Ethernet chips are made with older fab technology. There isn’t a huge, crying demand for Ethernet chips made with 0.90nm processes, for example.
Buuuuut.... what if you want to cram a whole lot more stuff onto a chip and have it look the same outwards (eg, from the size of the package) as a commodity chip. Well, now you use a newer process, cram many, many, many more gates onto the chip than is usual, and you could have a complete embedded CPU+memory in there - alongside the commodity Ethernet functions.
Let’s go back to basics:
How do you know what is inside the epoxy package of a chip?
Answer: Absent splitting the package off the chip, you don’t know that there’s anything more in there than the functionality you bought. By testing all of the functionality, you can tell that something is *missing*, but you cannot tell that there might be something *extra*.
So if you’re a EE with the equipment, you think that you should be able to spot the extra logic through the JTAG interface, right?
They could use fuseable links and just blow open the connections from the JTAG interface to the extra logic when they ship the chip.
As I said previously - the only way to know what is really in those commodity chips is to open up the package, get our your microscope and start looking at what is on the wafer.
I think all that would be hard to do at the eithernet Phy layer.
Your point about not knowing what’s in a chip you purchase is a good one.
But as I said DOS type attacks would surely be doable.
They get real big and real expensive. A completely tricked-out Cisco carrier grade system will run an obscene amount of traffic (IIRC around 100 terabits per second) and cost an obscene amount of money.
ping!
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