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Chinese spy chips are found in hardware used by Apple, Amazon, Bloomberg says; Apple, AWS say no way
The chips, which Bloomberg said have been the subject of a top secret U.S. government investigation starting in 2015, were used for gathering intellectual property and trade secrets from American companies and may have been introduced by a Chinese server company called Super Micro that assembled machines used in the centers.
[...] China has long been suspected — but rarely directly implicated — in en masse spy campaigns based on hardware made there. The majority of electronic components used in U.S. technology are manufactured in China. Companies including component manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, as well as surveillance camera maker Hikvision, have all fallen under intense suspicion and scrutiny from the U.S. government in the past year.
I'd think that the big guys would be designing their own boards. Maybe we should only buy PCBs from South Korea.
Also at Bloomberg and The Guardian.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @06:28PM (2 children)
Intel AMT has been around for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_AMT_versions [wikipedia.org]
So it's more likely that this is fakenews/propaganda. As you said it's easier to use existing backdoors. The Chinese would be well aware of the AMT stuff and they might as well use it. You don't even have to tamper directly with it an additional NIC in a NIC won't always be noticed.
Why shove stuff between layers in a motherboard (as the bloomberg article claims) when there are already chips connected to the stuff you need - ethernet interface etc. It's not so easy to audit silicon for "unauthorized modifications/features".
Then they may claim only certain machines were affected... They already say stuff like:
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday October 05 2018, @09:19AM (1 child)
All fair points, however I had a look at your link, the first gen AMT was in motherboards of the same generation as the D975XBX2, which (based on what I found online) was released around 2006/2007.
The first gen AMT may not have been very useful as a backdoor. The wiki states that it only really had control over ethernet, at best it could have copied ethernet frames and forwarded traffic remotely, but a decent IDS would have noticed that.
However, assuming that the AMT system had a backdoor since the very beginning. Supermicro itself was founded in 1993, meaning that there was a 14 year gap before AMT came around. For all we know these chips might have been put in from the very start, and the Chinese spooks saw no reason to remove it even after other backdoors came into play. Always good to have multiple entrypoints into a system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @04:27PM
Supermicro is a US company. Founded by some guy from Taiwan (not the same country as China).