Re:Three Ways to Hack a Printed Circuit Board
by mindslight on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:31PM
(#24277486)
That started off accurate, but then it got painful. Of course files can be modified. This has nothing to do with being "ASCII" plain text. By the way the article meanders, it seems the author is a pure EE who thinks there could be some software pixie dust that could assure integrity without doing the full work of either trusting the fab house or checking their output. Sorry, there isn't.
Based on the title, I had thought this was going to be about ways to create a trojan by modifying only the unpopulated PCB. Once you're playing with components, you can just stick a second chip on the SPI bus that eg corrupts a few firmware instructions to avoid setting critical processor feature flags. The footprint likely already exists for supplier diversity. Although by now attackers have probably made integrated chips that contain the flash and the implant in a single package.
Based on the title, I had thought this was going to be about ways to create a trojan by modifying only the unpopulated PCB. Once you're playing with components, you can just stick a second chip on the SPI bus that eg corrupts a few firmware instructions to avoid setting critical processor feature flags. The footprint likely already exists for supplier diversity. Although by now attackers have probably made integrated chips that contain the flash and the implant in a single package.