NET
NE WS
TROJAN HORSE INSIDE?
By Alan Zeichick

Sleeper kill
switches may
lurk in military
systems and
networks.

We’re all familiar with backdoors in software, secret root passwords, and overrides in payroll software intended, perhaps, to give developers unauthorized bonus pay. Though many backdoors may be urban legends, I have indeed encountered such things in real life.

What if backdoors were installed in a nation’s defense systems at the hardware level—secretly—by its enemies? While this could be the premise of a sci-fi thriller, it’s actually not that far-fetched.

Writing in the Ne w York Times, John Markoff said that only 2 percent of the chips used in U.S. military equipment is manufactured in secure facilities and that the other 98 percent might possibly hide kill switches or backdoor access points. “As advanced systems like aircraft, missiles and radars have become dependent on their computing capabilities,” he wrote, “the specter of subversion causing weapons to fail in times of crisis or secretly corrupting crucial data has come to haunt military planners.

The problem has grown more severe as
most American semiconductor manu-
facturing plants have moved offshore.”
Could attempts to subvert these
chips be detected? Not a chance,
Markoff wrote chillingly, saying,
“Cyberwarfare analysts argue that while
most computer-security efforts have
until now been focused on software,
tampering with hardware circuitry may
ultimately be an equally dangerous
threat. That is because modern comput-
er chips routinely comprise hundreds of
millions, or even billions, of transistors.
The increasing complexity means that
subtle modifications in manufacturing
or in the design of chips will be virtually
impossible to detect.”
The thought that an enemy could
shut down—or take over—a country’s
weapon systems is terrifying. However,
the threat isn’t only to defense systems
or military equipment. Imagine the
economic implications of secret kill
switches built into business-grade
net work servers and network routers.
Imagine, too, the implications of remote
subversion of consumer-grade mobile
phones, laptop computers, and automo-
bile chips.

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