The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by RL_Quine on Thursday October 04, 2018 @06:10AM (#18138536)

It's not particularly magical, there's consumer chips around which are not a whole lot bigger (though obviously in a more standard package). You don't get a lot of resources, but you don't really need it if all the other frameworks are in place in other software. If this sort of thing is something you can buy on Mouser for a few cents, the espionage grade material is probably an order or magnitude more higher quality.

https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny4

For scale, this alone is about the size of a large SMD capacitor and would basically be lost in most designs today.

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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by Sidnicious on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:52AM (#18139030)

For another example, I have a couple of these which are a bit bigger but have an ARM SoC and onboard Bluetooth (with antenna):

https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/taiyo-yuden/e...

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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by RL_Quine on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:18AM (#18139184)

That's a crazy module, I had no idea anything of that scale existed for Bluetooth radios.

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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by newsDerp on Thursday October 04, 2018 @06:15AM (#18138549)

Figure it's custom silicon, given the nature of the story, and "magic" in the sense of "magic number programming" to time the attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29

For example, looking for ELF or Portable Executable headers, as a crude estimate to determine attack opportunities. In this case, the magic numbers would probably be more selective and sophisticated, but still have an aspect of hard-coded values, since we're talking custom silicon.

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