The Pentagon no longer trusts its chips.
Because the US microchip industry has shifted in recent years from manufacturing to mainly designing chips, the Department of Defense is increasingly having to buy its microchips from makers abroad, particularly in east Asia. Now the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board fears that if such microchips are incorporated into advanced weapons systems, such as GPS-guided smart bombs, adversaries might be able to tamper with the chips’ electronics in the factory to disrupt US military systems at critical times.
They could do this, the board fears, by installing “back-door” vulnerabilities such as hard-wired computer viruses, or by altering either the chemistry of the chip or the width of gaps between nanoscale wires to make chips burn out sooner than they should. Such tampering would be undetectable. “Neither extensive electrical testing nor reverse engineering is capable of reliably detecting compromised microelectronics components,” the board warns.
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Seeking reassurance, the Pentagon’s research arm DARPA last week began canvassing US universities and electronics companies for ways to allow the Department of Defense to check its imported chips. Called “Trust for integrated circuits”, the research drive seeks to develop “revolutionary” devices or systems to make microchip malware detectable.
DARPA believes one promising avenue of research could be self-repairing microchips that would switch back to a pre-tamper condition if they were interfered with.
