[IP] Pentagon's 'Kill Switch': Urban Myth?

The Pentagon is worried that "backdoors" in computer processors might
leave the American military vulnerable to an instant electronic
shut-down. Those fears only grew, after an Israeli strike on an alleged
nuclear facility in Syria. Many speculated that Syrian air defenses had
been sabotaged by chips with a built-in 'kill switch" -- commercial
off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar might have been
purposely fabricated with a hidden “backdoor” inside. By sending a
preprogrammed code to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted
the chips' function and temporarily blocked the radar."

This all had a very familiar ring to it. Those with long memories may
also recall exactly the same scenario before: air defenses knocked out
by the secret activation of code smuggled though in commercial
hardware.

This was back in 1991 and the first Iraq War, when the knockout blow was
administered by a virus carried by a printer : One printer, one virus,
one disabled Iraqi air defence.
[snip]

The entire story can be found here:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/kill-switch-urb.html

On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 11:17 -0700, David Farber wrote:

________________________________________

From: ' =JeffH ' [Jeff.Hodges@KingsMountain.com]

Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 9:37 PM

To: David Farber

Subject: fyi: DARPA Sponsors a Hunt For Malware In Microchips

DARPA Sponsors a Hunt For Malware In Microchips

slashdot.org/palm/18/08/05/01/1233244_1.shtml

DARPA Sponsors a Hunt For Malware In Microchips

from the double-barreled-microscope-loaded-for-vermin dept. posted by timothy

on 2008-05-01 13:23:00

Phurge links to an IEEE Spectrum story on an interesting DARPA project with

some scary implications about just what it is we don't know about what chips

are doing under the surface. It's a difficult problem to find invasive or

otherwise malicious capabilities built into a CPU; this project's goal is to

see whether vendors can find such hardware-level spyware in chips

http://spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6171

like those used in military hardware. Phurge excerpts: "Recognizing this

enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program

yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future

additions to its arsenal. ... In January, the Trust program started its

prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions

of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until

the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they

can."

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end

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