Apple Ping!
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Posted on 12/11/2018 9:56:49 AM PST by Swordmaker
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Computer hardware maker Super Micro Computer Inc told customers on Tuesday that an outside investigations firm had found no evidence of any malicious hardware in its current or older-model motherboards. In a letter to customers, the San Jose, California, company said it was not surprised by the result of the review it commissioned in October after a Bloomberg article reported that spies for the Chinese government had tainted Super Micro equipment to eavesdrop on its clients. Nardello tested samples of motherboards in current production and versions that were sold to Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc, which were both named in the article, the person said. It also examined software and design files without finding any unauthorized components or signals being sent out. He said the company was still reviewing its legal options. Apple, Amazon and U.S. and U.K. officials have all said they have no knowledge of any hardware attacks via Super Micro.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasdaq.com ...
This has already been cleared by other entities (including some big names that have a solid reason to want to root out any such malicious hardware).
BUT - if your company is accused of secretly including malicious hardware - you would do everything you could to deny and disprove it - so I would say that this company’s “word” isn’t worth much.
Kind of like President Obama promising the most transparent administration ever...
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I was never into Commidor64.. but it Was (and as far as I know, still is) great at seeing all (packets sent and received... it was/is hackers heaven, for those that can still read the coding... seems not many can do much more than read scripts anymore though :p .... thankfully, we do have a few other old timers here that can remember what we used to have to go through)..
Sometimes old tech is still useful.
I just figured out one way they could have done this.
At Intel, we occasionally found fake re-packaged die with Intel labels and part numbers with other semiconductor chips in them.
AMD made actually the first one we found.
On electron microscope scanning, the die even had Intel trademark on the die.
It would be possible for a company to do exactly this and flip the fake part for the real one in assembly.
However most motherboards are assembled in Taiwan and not mainland China.
Still, it would be possible to do this with enough $$$ exchanging hands.
I am not sure how the 64 is used today?
With the serial port, it can be used to capture all of the i/o input/output...
It can be assembly/machine language or be binary... but ALL of the information is there to read (if you can read it).
It is too slow to handle current i/o.
“Kind of like President Obama promising the most transparent administration ever...”
“If you like your Chinese-spyware-free motherboards, you can keep your Chinese-spyware-free motherboards”
I’ve said it before- it is very possible but highly unlikely that this method would be used.
Manufacturing a microchip that works AS IT IS SUPPOSED TO but also does malicious stuff (in hardware) is extremely expensive and unlikely to reach a large enough audience to make it cost effective, when there are considerably easier ways to hack a computer.
Ok for the pedantic here, the government has enough money to make one, and could put one in the hand of a country they wanted to spy on, but the same rule applies- it would be easier to do it in software than in hardware.
Unless finding it in the hardware gave those looking a false sense of security and made them less likely to look harder in the software.
Or vice versa.
Lemme take a wild guess here:
The testing was contracted by a California university’s IT dept, and the tests were conducted by Chinese exchange graduate students using “bug” detection equipment & software provided via a grant by Huawei ???
All the information is essentially binary, bits that are recognized as 1's or 0's, or on or off, basically a voltage differential. An interpreter packages them into displayed packages as assembly language.
I've been programming assembly/machine language since the 1970s, micros to minis to mainframes. I was never comfortable reading the data as binary, octal or hex, but preferred an interpreter to display the data as language code.
Back in the early 1980s I had a supervisor that amazed me because he could look at binary, octal or hex and instantly read off the assembly code instructions and data without an interpreter. Guy was like a machine! Only worked with him about 4 months before he left to work on robotics stuff, a genius. Me, I look at 1's and 0's and still only see 1's and 0's. Programming is so much easier now, with high level languages.
I hated reading Binary :/
Assembly was much easier to digest (I don’t even remember much of that anymore :p)
I DID enjoy remapping the keyboard (through assembly) to totally confuse my friends when they were on the PC though :D
That's mean! But I like it! You must be a fan of Dr. August Dvorak (the Dvorak keyboard which some people use, can switch to it in your OS).
Lest one think that Octal or Hex are the only alternatives to Binary in play, I once had a gig programming 5-bit code for SFPD. They used it back in the 1970s to conserve space on the mainframes. Weirdest thing ever, converting binary by breaking out every 5 bits to form commands. I forget what it was used for, as I coded various things for the Police, from criminal lookups to the feds to cross-platform communications. A mish-mash of platforms and systems, hope they tossed out the old stuff.
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