I’m in the business myself.....and to address your statement/question: You and others assume that no one seems to care about QC; that product isn’t analyzed, inspected, checked out, shaken out, etc. to the nth degree before dissemination.
Hardly.
The Chinese aren’t supermen, #1, and #2, the finest minds on the planet in the semiconductor industry are in American companies. We’re the OPEC of information technology, and the world full-well knows it. If the Chicomms were to attempt a cyber attack on this country, there are FAR more effective ways to approach it than inserting cutesy “time bombs” into silicon. That’s nonsense.
The Chinese aren’t supermen, #1, and #2, the finest minds on the planet in the semiconductor industry are in American companies.
You and others assume that no one seems to care about QC; that product isn’t analyzed, inspected, checked out, shaken out, etc. to the nth degree before dissemination.
Without being a Clarke apologist or asserting "superman," my worldview of the ChiComs is quite different.
QC? Simply a dog and pony show. Well planned and often rehearsed before the always announced "VIP's" ever arrive. Following suspicions that China exported toxic pet foods or lead painted toys; we've found these consumer items deeply integrated beyond the marketplace.
Fact is more Chinese people speak English than USA citizens do; more Chinese students graduate with advanced technical degrees each year than the USA enjoys. The technology gap quickly closes.
What ChiComs can't develop on their own, they steal; what they can't steal, they'll purchase. And what they can't purchase outright, ChiComs will bribe seditious politicians to do their will.
China's cyberwarfare command is quite a sophisticated apparatchik, no thanks to Google. Keyword gleans of our social media sites, including FreeRepublic, for national security technical discussions help them target sensitive USA military systems. And US business research and development.
My gut feeling is most "wikileaks" products are simply overt cyberware demonstrations. Our enemies demonstrate they can and do penetrate our secure communications networks. Rather than the work of a lone deranged sissy like Bradley Manning.
Chances are the moment China decides it's to their advantage; tech items such as my Droid 4 phone will become a paperweight.
OLA
The “time bomb” thing is utter twaddle.
But dropping the ability to activate a monitoring functionality in an ethernet chipset with a remote “golden packet?”
Pud easy. Time bombs are for amateurs. Turning your enemy’s entire network into your own version of the NSA... that’s appealing.
And QC wouldn’t catch it. Not unless QC for chipsets includes a scanning electron microscope on the silicon, asking “Hey, what do these seemingly extra set of gates over here do?” The chip works perfectly as intended, in every way. You have to take a look at the chip and say “OK, this set of gates does that, and this other set of gates does this... OK, all that’s required... and what’s this set over here do?”
It just passed off as a little extra “diagnostic logic” on the chip.
BTW — I know for a fact from experience that Ethernet chipsets aren’t that well checked out. We had to deal with problems in the IFG on the SEEQ 8003 chipset way back in the mid-90’s. That was just one of the chipsets that had problems under high loads... and it took logging packets on the wire with scopes (oscilloscopes, not data analyzers) to prove the problem to the chip vendors. They refused to deal with the problems in their chipsets until we rubbed their noses in it.