You both right, and very, very wrong.
You are correct in that there are no trojans, or secret backdoors. These are things like PROMS, transistors, capacitors, resistors and even obsolete 8 bit processors and assorted gates.
However, often these designs are very crude and poorly made copies, that can pass very basic functionality tests, but fail later on - far earlier than a ‘legitimate’ part. I’ve heard of brake pads that ‘looked’ like the real thing, but were compressed asphalt, paint and yak dung. It wasn’t until they were damp that one box of these brake pads started smelling really bad.
There are microprocessors that only have partially functional portions of the chip. Again, passing tests like continuity, gross functionality - but incapable of executing certain commands. Just enough to get past the incoming inspection screen.
It’s not unusual to buy a reel of chips, with the first 50 units being Bin fails for speed (work great on a 1 MHz tester, but fail at full operational speed), and the rest of the reel is literally “empty” packages with no die in them at all.
The threat is that when a device is “needed”, that is may fail unexpectedly - thus jeopardizing the life of the crew. This is a legitmate threat, and a serious one.
“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.
Falsely marking parts circumvents a critical step in the QA process and could be called an equivalent to sabotage.
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.
Years ago, I bought one of those 5-foot long outlet strips from Fry's. It featured about 8 outlets well spaced, so it was easy to use every outlet with a wall wart.
I had installed it at my desk. After a few weeks, I noticed some suspicious intermittent buzzing noises, which I traced to the strip. I could jiggle some of the plugs and induce, or stop the buzzing. So at that point I figured I'd have to tear it open and see what was up.
What I found was the strangest excuses for solder joints I had seen in 50 years, even including my own beginning work back in the 50's. ≤}B^)
Many of the joints between the wire bus and the tab at the rear of each socket contact were tenuous at best. And the flux, ahhh, the flux! It was hard, vitreous, and green, in many cases insulating the mutual areas of contact between the bus wire, the socket tab, and the sorry-looking blob of solder.
I cut up, unsoldered, and removed the bus wires, cleaned up the socket tabs, replaced the bus wires with new, and resoldered everything. Took about five hours, but at least I finally had a reliable outlet strip.
I theorize that these were made (in China, of course) in dozens of little cottage shops dotting the countryside, where many of them had no notion of proper soldering technique. Some old rural Chinese lore probably told them to use pond scum for solder flux. And the go-go Chinese entrepeneur had set up these little feeder shops and aggregated them to fulfill the orders from the US retailers. Quality control? Process? Sorry, round-eyes, no time for them!
I later heard of lawsuits against Fry's over these strips. I presume some of them damaged the connected equipment, or even started fires.
Good posts.
The Chinese have duplicated nearly every electronic part there is and they sell functional parts that work......for a while. What they don’t sell, unless they are specifically required to, are milspec parts that are load tested and sturdy enough for military use.
Their other problem is quality control. Unless they are required to, they pull far fewer parts out for random testing, so Chinese electronics have a much higher failure rate.
Case in part are capacitors for frequency drives. Nearly all came from Japan, very high quality and sturdy. Then the tsunami hit and destroyed 80% of the capacitor factories.
Taiwan assembles most of the boards and had to go to Chinese capacitors that had supposedly the same QC as the Japanese. Soon, many frequency drives started to fail because of too many bad capacitors.
So, the frequency drive makers then required every Chinese capacitor to be load tested, dramatically slowing down frequency drive deliveries.
The Chinese are perfectly capable of producing high quality parts. They respond to market demand. If cheap is what you want, cheap is what you get.
There are too many electronics makers hungry for cheap parts and then passing them off as something of quality.