Reply #3: This on the agenda too? [View All]

[Ghost Dog]

IN THE 1991 Gulf war Iraq’s armed forces used American-made colour photocopiers to produce their battle plans. That was a mistake. The circuitry in some of them contained concealed transmitters that revealed their position to American electronic-warfare aircraft, making bomb and missile strikes more precise. The operation, described by David Lindahl, a specialist at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, a government think-tank, highlights a secret front in high-tech warfare: turning enemy assets into liabilities.

The internet and the growing complexity of electronic circuitry have made it much easier to install what are known as “kill switches” and “back doors”, which may disable, betray or blow up the devices in which they are installed. Chips can easily contain 2 billion transistors, leaving plenty of scope to design a few that operate secretly. Testing even a handful of them for anomalies requires weeks of work.

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An obvious countermeasure is to keep critical defence equipment off the net. But that is only a partial solution. Chips can be designed to break down at a certain date. An innocent-looking component or even a bit of soldering can be a disguised antenna. When it receives the right radio signal, from, say, a mobile-phone network, aircraft or satellite, the device may blow up, shut down, or work differently.

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Such tricks may be handy in dealing with unreliable allies as well as foes, but they can also hamper Western efforts to contain risk in unstable countries. Pakistan has blocked American efforts to safeguard its nuclear facilities. The country’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, cites fears that such measures will include secret remote controls to shut the nuclear programme down. A European defence official says even video surveillance cameras can intercept or disrupt communications. To avoid such threats, Pakistani engineers laboriously disassemble foreign components and replicate them.

/... http://www.economist.com/node/18527456?story_id=18527456

Apposite 'toon.