Apple confirms again: No so-called Chinese spy chip found!

Source: Content is compiled from Confidence Daily and other media, thank you.

Apple reconfirmed to the US Senate committee that it did not find the alleged Chinese spy chips.

The tech giant's security chief, George Stathakopoulos, wrote to the Senate Commerce Committee on Sunday, saying that after repeated checks of its own equipment, it could not find the Chinese spy chips that the media claimed were installed in the equipment.

Last Thursday, rumors emerged that China had installed spy chips in the bottom panels of products ordered by more than 30 US technology giants to steal data. Apple and Amazon immediately denied that they had found such chips. The UK National Cyber ​​Security Centre and the US Department of Homeland Security said there was no reason to question the denials issued by Apple and Amazon.

Stathakopoulos said in the letter that a re-examination of the motherboard mentioned in the report did not find the alleged spy chip.

In response to statements issued by some American companies denying that chips had been illegally implanted in them, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on the 6th that there was no reason to question the statements of these companies.

The Department of Homeland Security said it was aware of media reports that some companies' technology supply chains had been hacked, and there was no reason to question the (denial) statements issued by these companies.

The Department of Homeland Security also said that ensuring the security of the communications industry's supply chain is one of its core responsibilities, and the Department of Homeland Security will further strengthen U.S. cybersecurity.

Bloomberg Businessweek recently published an article claiming that China implanted a microchip into the products of about 30 companies to obtain secrets. However, companies involved in the article, including Apple and Amazon, issued statements saying that the report was groundless, that their products had not been implanted with external chips, and that they had not reported the matter to the US government as claimed in the report.

"We can be very clear that Apple has never found malicious chips, hardware manipulation, or implanted vulnerabilities on any of its servers," Apple said in a statement. "Apple has never reported this incident to the FBI or any other agency, and we are not aware of any investigation by the FBI or its police counterparts."

Paul McLellan, a well-known chip expert in the United States, a SEMIWIKI contributor, and a PhD graduate in computer science from the University of Edinburgh, believes that the Bloomberg report is completely unreliable. Even if a corrupt foundry really intends to implant a chip in a PCB, it would require redesigning and remanufacturing the motherboard. The chip reported by Bloomberg is very small, as shown in the comparison of the chip vs. the US dollar coin in the above picture. Such a small chip can only connect a few signals, and all these signals must be concentrated in a small area of ​​the circuit board.

According to him, it is easy to make semiconductor chips thin and light. Sony's CMOS sensor chip is less than 3um thick, but how to connect it to enough signals? According to the Bloomberg article, the main function of these chips is to penetrate hardware and need to achieve a load that can do the dirty work. He really doesn't see how to do it.

Paul McLellan pointed out that the cleverness of the Bloomberg article is that it tells everyone that you can easily fool the Linux system by putting a chip on the motherboard, without using a password and only with a small amount of signal. According to him, if it is for monitoring, just passively connecting the chip is not enough, but if the chip needs to do some activities (monitoring data and occasionally changing data), then it must run at high speed, and it must also solve the problem of signal integrity, and it also needs a clean power supply, etc.

In addition to his analysis, Paul McLellan also mentioned the analysis report of another security expert Gruqq, which has more technical content. If you want to know more, you can take a look at it.

By the way, the latter’s opinion is similar to that of Paul McLellan, who both believe that the Bloomberg report is “nonsense.”

Paul McLellan pointed out that most reports were written by American journalists who reported what Business Week said, what Apple said, and what Amazon said based on what they learned in journalism school, without analyzing the reliability of any factor, and trying to communicate and interview anyone willing to provide any opinion.

While Paul McLellan considers the Bloomberg article to be fiction (at best there is some truth in it, but most people think it is nonsense), he points out a real problem - the supply chain can be compromised and the "root of trust" for security starts with the hardware, which means it starts with some semi-anonymous foundry in China.

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