Posted on 05/22/2012 8:42:58 AM PDT by the scotsman
'More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed.
A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force's largest cargo plane. The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said.
"This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs," committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said. "It underscores China's failure to police the blatant market in counterfeit parts - a failure China should rectify," he added.
As part of a year-long investigation, the US Government Accountability Office created a fictitious company and purchased electronic parts on the internet. Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers. The components came from suppliers based in China - which Senator Levin described as the "epicentre of electronic part counterfeiting".
The report accused Beijing of openly allowing counterfeiting operations, and said attempts by officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the probe had failed. US authorities and contract companies contributed to the problem by not detecting the fakes and routinely failing to report them, the report said.
The Defense Department was also criticised for lacking "knowledge of the scope and impact of counterfeit parts on critical defence systems".
Committee member Senator John McCain said the prevalence of bogus parts made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to "our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it".'
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
“You are correct in that there are no trojans, or secret backdoors.”
Wrong!
Almost anything connected to a computer can execute a back door trojan. Even a USB plug can host an embedded firmware trojan.
How about ‘Fake Chinese ingredients’ found in prescription drugs? We have an FDA that looks the other way and let’s China go without the inspections that the US and the rest of the world finds essential to safe medicine.
China is not our friend.
Falsely marking parts circumvents a critical step in the QA process and could be called an equivalent to sabotage.
UNCLASSIFIED:
a micro-processor with NV RAM can be hidden within a transistor or almost any other component of a circuit board.
The big issue(s) would be quality, escapism and latency. Any of the storage conditions or handling requirements could be violated and we may never know or may find out at the most inopportune time (that is what latency is all about). Intermittency and latency are the bane of quality when it comes to electronics. Of course manufacturing practices, process control, materials used, etc... all play into this as well. Of course I might not know much about that having been in the field doing QA work on microelectronics for the last 20 years.
There is no protection for IP in China - any company transferring any development or manufacturing there is asking for their IP to be ripped off and cheaply mass produced. By cheaply mass produced I mean both cheap in price and quality...
The black box might not care the first time you test it, but there are no guarantees with counterfeits after they escape your detection system. No detection system is 100% when it comes to defects testing...
Thanks the scotsman.
Yup. Wasn’t gonna go into it any further with the “horsesh!t” poster...
This is unfrigginbelievable! Why in hell are parts for our aircraft being made in China? I know that most car parts that are not OEM come from there and they are total CRAP but this is crazy!
And THAT my FRiend, is the ultimate point!
VISUAL INSPECTION is what these procurement bureaucrat ijits are talking about.
If you are relying on what's printed on the package or the reel or on the component, then THAT is the problem, because you are just as vulnerable to a failure due to an innocent mislabeling or a test escape error as you are to malicious intent.
In military equipment, you must control the acceptance test for the system.
And yes, they do partial sampling for environmental burn-in and accelerated lifetime tests, and yes you can validate system tests even if you don't verify every cell in a memory.
These systems passed the qualification tests. So either the tests are adequate and it doesn't matter functionally that they got knock-off parts that met that stringent test spec, or the tests are inadequate because when sampled in the extended burn-in tests they failed.
These stories are ENGINEERING stories about quality control. They are NOT chicom espionage stories, although the reporter word-magicians are counting on non-engineers to draw the conclusion that the chinese are magically putting TCP/IP backdoors into resistors and capacitors by mislabeling them.
Only someone who is either totally naive or willfully dishonest intellectually can make the claim you just made. Obviously you’ve either never worked in the electronics field, or if you have you’ve never worked in a proper QA role and/or taken quality seriously. Of course I work with a lot of people on the supplier side in a major medical device manufacturer that think the same exact way you just did - it is terrifying to think we rely on people who think like this...
You watch entirely too much start trek. Yes, Jordy. During a dogfight the chinese pilot will flip a switch and all chinese made 5kOhm resistors will activate an internal program and suddenly morph into 4kOhm resistors and....something.
I have worked in the electronics industry for 17 years now. I have encountered Chinese fake components before.
Whereas I agree with the scale of what can be hidden, if the stealth component is not laid out properly then it really doesn’t matter because it won’t work. And if a designer is laying out a component with all those extra traces that he/she doesn’t know what they do then they are plain incompetent. That scale of incompetence is unlikely.
I bet I could make a component that would look like a resistor until it received a particular coded series of pulses and then make it “fail” open or shorted.
And I’m not even a sufficiently motivated, determined and patient enemy.
Fake electronic parts and inferior bogus software from China are so intertwined in American technology I don’t see how they could ever be extricated. It would be like trying to surgically remove a parasitic invasion from the brain without killing the host.
So what? You just trust that whatever someone ships you from within the US is not substandard?
What responsibility (in your world) does the system manufacturer have to test and validate the systems they build with imported or domestic components?
How about I reword your statement to be more in line with actual manufacturing practices?
The US Military is knowingly procuring US defense systems with substandard testing which can't tell the difference between standard and substandard components.
Why didn't they write that? Because mil-spec and even cots acquisition for avionics and such is so stringent that what these stories tell me is that these "counterfeit" parts are probably either very high-quality knockoffs, or, more likely, are production endstock that wasn't accounted for, or fell of a chicom mob truck. It is NOT a magic back door to F22s.
And this is exactly what these MSM writers what you to conjure in your fertile mind, and not in reality concentrate on what they actually say, which is that they were functional in-spec parts that didn't pay back into the correct IP stream.
If someone wants to do that kind of espionage, it would be easier to incorporate it into legitimately labeled parts from "domestic" chip companies.
I bet I could make a component that would look like a resistor until it received a particular coded series of pulses and then make it “fail” open or shorted.
And I’m not even a sufficiently motivated, determined and patient enemy.
Very good point.
What kind of idiot QA person thinks that they should blindly trust a component just because it's supplied by a "domestic" company.
So you exclude all chinese chips? What about Singapore? Texas Instruments chips made in Singapore? Germany? Japan?
What's worse? A potential adversary looking to sell knock-off chips to us, or a domestic "QA expert" who can't tell the difference between a boogieman and a burn-in chamber?
Without going into details ... something as "New" as USB1.0 is typically just procured through a COTS channel. Just buy a F3I inspection on a new Motherboard - and you are off running again. Just order a new motherboard from Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Intel or whereever. These have very reliable supply chains - practically no threat. And even *if* there were, the secure networks are physically and virtually seperated from non-secure networks.
The Chicom fakes are things like resistors, capacitors, obsolete UV-erasable PROMS, 8 bit microprocessors, logic gates. If they are as "new" as 20 yrs ago, the odds are that they can and will be procured from a reliable supplier.
The Military only goes through the aftermarket on components that are 'obsolete'. You are not at risk for a "trojan" from a capacitor, resistor or a choke. For starters, there is no way to know 'where' that device is going to be located, what OS the device will run, if that device is even digital - we have quite a bit of analog in these old systems.
Did you know that the Chicoms also make fake toothpaste as well? Anything that can be made and sold at a profit is a target for counterfeiting. Watches, cell phones, iPods, iPads, jeans, perfume, brake pads, car batteries, computer components, monitors, jelly beans - the list is endless.
LOL. I bet you're going to want to pull that post. Draw me a circuit. You've got two pins. Which one is ground?
Ready? Set? Go!
(The chinese don't have to fight us if this is the extent of our education.)
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