Foreign Policy Blogs

Hardware Hacks

The Hill had a piece recently talking about Republican Senatorial angst around Chinese networking electronics giant Huawei providing equipment to Sprint.

Huawei, like all firms of any importance in China, has significant ties to the CCP leadership and the People’s Liberation Army.

The idea is that Sprint, being a major provider of IT to the US military, might be compromising security by putting hardware in place that might already be hacked in the physical hardware itself.

Some parts of the Senators’ argument can be dismissed – Huawei sold equipment to Iran? So did the lovable Finns – but the underlying anxiety is valid, if a stretch.

Hardware hacks – some sort of embedded trojan in the physical wiring of electronics – are largely theoretical. I’m not familiar with any examples of them being successfully deployed.

Doing really sneaky things via embedded hardware trojans would be quite difficult. Since they are literally hard-wired, they cannot adapt or respond to their environment or changing circumstances. However, it would be relatively easy for a particular circuit to turn the CPU to slag when activated.

No need to lose too much sleep over this. Yes, you can’t really examine circuits without electron microscopes – but the nefarious effort is literally stamped on the circuit board for those with eyes to see, and some of those eyes are owned by the Pentagon. They’re keeping tabs on this stuff. Right, guys?