Is it plausible to think that our gung-ho free trade principles, regards Red China, et al, could be used against us?
The thing is, we don’t know. We really don’t. Reverse-engineering a chip under a microscope is really time-consuming work for talented chip engineers. There’s lots of chips and lots of revisions levels to the same make/model of chip involved.
How many products could employ the same tactic? Lots. There’s a lot of non-bleeding edge stuff that is now made in China, on PRC-controlled fabs. Just ho-hum little chips in everything from radios, to consumer electronics, to computers, to... insert your widget here.
Is there a way around this if a problem is found? Thankfully, yes. A fast slap-dash fix in highly sensitive hardware can use network controllers that are implemented on FPGA (field programmable gate arrays), and you can get standard network interface logic packages to blow into these chips. When you’ve programmed the chip to do what you want, you can blow off the rest of the gates so it will never do anything else. This is a spendy solution, but it works and you could have a working controller very quickly that you could slap in place of a PCI card with a faulty chipset, and you’d have a known good interface like... this week. Once you have a source of PCI cards and FPGA’s, the replication process is pretty quick. The FPGA’s are spendy, tho, and your typical $40 Ethernet NIC becomes a $150 to $300+ item with the FPGA plus labor costs.
Longer term, all we’d need is for a company to produce a verifiable chipset on a PCI card and start plugging those controllers in, plug the 10[0,0]BaseT cable into the PCI card and turn off any built-in interfaces.