So all this is doing is harming Intel and Qualcomm, while incentivizing Huawei to invest even more in domestic chips.
https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-providing-90-of-chips-us...
What sanctions ? You do realize that US jurisdiction is in US and some vasal states.
"Russia had been forced to repeatedly establish new supply chains for acquiring chips. As sanctions disrupted existing smuggling routes, it had set up new ones, likening these outcomes to a game of “whack-a-mole”, that was frustrating for both Western governments as well as “supply-chain managers at Russian missile and drone factories”.
The biggest failure in enforcing the controls is not that Russia continues to have some success in smuggling — that’s not a surprise — but that China continues shamelessly to sell Russia so much via normal trade routes."
Ptychographic X-ray laminography has come a long way and can image even the latest chips at the transistor level:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/xray-tech-lays-chip-secrets-bare
True, it requires a synchrotron (one of the few things that actually costs more than a chip fab), but China has those:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
China might not be able to make bleeding-edge 2nm chips, but it has the equipment needed to expose any backdoors in them. Publicly, worldwide, with proof. That is an existential threat to any hardware manufacturer -- getting caught doing that is a bankruptcy-level event. Until recently they didn't have to be afraid of getting caught.
Being able to image chips at the gate level or better is a critical lever in fixing the balance of power between hardware manufacturers and their customers. It's why Bunnie Huang's work on IRIS is so important:
Things like the Intel ME are what make this arrangement work. The fact that the ME exists is public knowledge; there is a huge team of engineers at Intel who are responsible for designing it. The flaw that lets you tickle it in just the right way can be added by and known to only one or two people.
Just this year a spectacular example of one of these bugdoors was revealed in Apple's mobile chips, where an EL1 (kernel) attacker could tickle an undocumented L2 cache debugging mechanism to elevate to hypervisor/bootloader (EL2, EL3) level, and completely bypass Pointer Authentication:
https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_wh...
This hardware bugdoor (CVE-2023-38606) was discovered only because it was used against security researchers who were good enough to capture a trace of exactly what it was doing. Otherwise we would never know. We got very lucky here; there's no telling how many more of these things go undiscovered.
Huawei is already banned from selling, why would they kick the dead horse so to say.
If anyone has any ideas, genuinely please let me know! I'm curious.