If we look at the history of backdoors, one of the earliest cases of implementing a backdoor during production was described by Ken Thompson who along with Dennis Ritchie, received the ACM Turing award in 1983, for "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.". In his Turing award lecture, Reflections On Trusting Trust, Ken Thompson described a hack that he placed into early UNIX systems: the C compiler would insert a back door whenever it compiled the login program, allowing Ken Thompson to access any UNIX system. The scheme was so fiendish that if you tried remove the back-door generating code from the source code and recompile the compiler, the compiler would reintroduce the back door generation into the source code!
This demonstrated that it was possible to introduce a backdoor into an application even through the source code had no backdoor, through out history there have been rumours of all sorts of industrial espionage being conducted and the military are often accursed of implementing hidden functionality into all sorts of equipment, so it is no surprise that the Chinese are being accused of do so, and Huawei (Officially Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.) is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company. It is the second-largest supplier of mobile telecommunications infrastructure equipment in the world (after Ericsson). Is often linked to such activities. Earlier this year Australia blocked Huawei from tendering for contracts in the country's
$38 billion National Broadband Network (NBN) due to cyber security concerns. Huawei is one of the vendors for BT 21st Century Network in the UK.
In the last couple of weeks there has been stories circulating about a backdoor discovered in a chip manufactured in China for the Military.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#Assurance
" We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. "
There have been a number of articles related to the original from well established security bloggers.
http://erratasec.blogspot.fr/2012/05/bogus-story-no-chinese-backdoor-in.html
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/5889/security/china-made-us-military-chip-security-backdoor-or-debugging-functionality.html
Which question as whether it is a deliberate backdoor or debugging tool, read the articles and judge for yourself.
One of my first reactions on reading the original story was to google the researcher name to see if he was actually a researcher a Cambridge, and he does seem to be a legitimate researcher.
As to whether it is a deliberate backdoor or not, I'm not sure, however there are some good questions and points raised.
- Are countries / industry building backdoors in - very likely and not just the Chinese.
- Is the technique identified by the researcher valid and useful - yes.
- Was it a hidden backdoor - need more information on the findings
It does show that hardware and software are slowly merging with programmable chips becoming part of mainstream production rather rapid prototyping. The whole affair did remind me of a conversation I had with a colleague in the mid 80's about using a reprogramme ROM and programmable logic gates to build a computer that could redesign and reprogramme itself.
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