Altering circuit boards with little outboard SMT modules is the cartoon stock-photo version, whereas a deep hardware backdoor might involve a few trace alterations on chip lithography masters. This would be potentially extremely hard to detect, and involves polishing a suspect chip down to the silicon circuitry for further analysis to find evidence of tampering.
[Altering circuit boards with little outboard SMT modules is the cartoon stock-photo version, whereas a deep hardware backdoor might involve a few trace alterations on chip lithography masters. This would be potentially extremely hard to detect, and involves polishing a suspect chip down to the silicon circuitry for further analysis to find evidence of tampering.]
People who think this is hard are thinking of the resources available to script kiddies. The Chinese government can basically draft design and production engineers, swear them to secrecy on pain of death, and put them to work. This is child’s play for a national security state with China’s coercive powers in-country, given all the design and production technologies that the West has placed at China’s disposal in the course of outsourcing its entire production base to the Orient.