
U.S. and U.K. F-35 Jets Include 'Core' Circuit Boards from Chinese-Owned Company - protomyth
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/15/chinese-owned-company-supplies-electronics-on-u-s-and-u-k-f-35-fighter-jets/#f144b3c25c05
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ajross
It's a PCB manufacturer.

They aren't buying computers from china. The company that did design the
electronics (GE) decided to have this little outfit manufacture the PCBs for
them (I mean, we're talking a production run in the low thousands so far --
this is NOT a big project). And the little outfit got bought by a bigger PCB
company in China a few years back.

The risk to the supply chain is zero -- anyone can make printed circuit
boards. The intelligence risk is limited to the ability to see how chips are
wired together, with some ability to guess what ICs are in use by clues in the
pinouts.

~~~
chrisseaton
I don't know anything about intercepting electronics, but I would not bet my
life (which is what you're doing) that a good signals intelligence agency
cannot somehow compromise a PCB.

~~~
vidarh
I agree. I mean if we're guessing at possible dangers, it seems like there are
several possible angles that might be tempting to try:

\- It's meant to be a stealthy plane, how about tweaking the board to cause a
nice and noisy signal leak in certain circumstances?

\- find a way of causing the board to fail under suitable circumstances.

\- Probably less plausible, if they can figure out what data is passing
through the board, then there is potential to engineer side-channels in the
hope that they can achieve another compromise that can leverage it. Maybe they
never get the chance to take advantage, maybe they do. Or if e.g. they can
find an input that an adversary can potentially influence by how they engage
with the plane, use that to trigger failure as above.

I'm assuming they're properly inspected and tested on receipt, but wires on
circuit boards can interfere with each other in messy ways if you exceed
tolerances even a little bit. I recall an amusing case some years back where
someone used genetic algorithms to lay out features on an FPGA and got a very
good solution that was totally un-reproducible: it turned out their GA had
optimized to take advantage of quirks of that one specific FPGA that didn't
work on other FPGA's of the same model, by combining things in ways it hadn't
been designed for. It seems it's very much possible to design chips that
superficially looks like it should act one way but where it acts differently
in certainly circumstances.

Doing so in a way that's exploitable without being caught out is probably much
harder, but I share your skepticism.

~~~
delfinom
That's not how PCBs work at all. Dear god.

Such mission critical to EMI designs would be submitted to full spectrum EMI
tests once assembled (hitting it with noise of all kinds of frequencies AND
testing it for leaks of all kinds).

Causing a bare board to fail? lol, perhaps if you have an atomic
disintegrator. Assembled boards with actual components? Now you have something
you can actually fail but this PCB house does not do said assembly nor have
access to that.

Figure out what data? Completely impossible. These are just copper traces.
They don't get told "Mr Copper trace, you are going to do i2c and send XYZ
data! and you are going to be a pci express and send ABC!" at the fab. Jeez.

 _Now a real cause for concern_ , if say a state actor had access to the
completed assembly going into the planes, they could identify a place to embed
a backdoor. The state actor controlled PCB house could then embed the backdoor
into the PCB itself. But at that point you have 2 different security breaches
and the PCB guy is probably lesser of your concerns.

The dumber thing would be to alter the current carrying capacity of power
traces which tend to be obvious staring at a board. But it would just
identical to trolling by causing boards to fail and eventually get it
investigated and your supplier contract revoked.

~~~
saulrh
> They don't get told "Mr Copper trace, you are going to do i2c and send XYZ
> data! and you are going to be a pci express and send ABC!" at the fab. Jeez.

I do only very basic electronics, so I'm asking here in honest confusion: Why
_can 't_ you figure that out? I'd have expected that part footprints, high-
level topology, fine details of individual traces, and the general need for
everything to make sense at all would tell you everything you needed to know.

RF optimizations (squiggles to control propagation delay, weird shapes in
corners, notches) (edit: wouldn't these give you the bus's frequency too?) and
thermal tweaks (wider traces, bigger vias) would give you information about
the pinout of whatever's plugged into each footprint (fast, slow, low-power,
high-power, etc). Basic topology (is a line connected to two pins or thirty,
is a line isolated or is it part of a sixteen-wide or ninety-wide bus) would
narrow that down even more. More important parts will almost necessarily have
more lines coming out of their footprints so you'd have more information about
the stuff you care about.

Even if we assume there're no standards in use ("941 lines, power here here
and here, high-frequency bus with 288 lines here, so that's socket AM3, which
means these are..."), I wouldn't have surprised if you'd told me you could
figure out what part numbers they're dropping into the slots for
microprocessors and similar. What am I missing? Why _can 't_ you figure out
which lines are i2c to misc peripherals and which lines are PCIe between CPU
and key coprocessors?

~~~
ohazi
> > They don't get told "Mr Copper trace, you are going to do i2c and send XYZ
> data! and you are going to be a pci express and send ABC!" at the fab. Jeez.

> I do only very basic electronics, so I'm asking here in honest confusion:
> Why can't you figure that out?

You can. OP is trying to be snarky, but he's wrong.

I don't think it's worth getting into an argument with someone with such an
obviously demeaning attitude ("Dear God," "Jeez," etc.), but a few points:

1\. It's not just bare copper, silkscreen frequently tells you what's going
on, even in secretive government airplanes.

2\. Even without silkscreen, e.g. on assembled boards where the chip part
numbers have been lasered off for "secrecy," you can often uniquely identify a
chip family just by the pins connected to power/ground, certain passives like
crystals or filters, etc.

3\. If it's a chip with highly remappable pins where you can't just look up
which ones are i2c in a datasheet (e.g. FPGA), you can often find them routed
together with obvious strategies for impedance control and/or shielding.

4\. For i2c in particular, you will likely see two wires routed together, each
with a resistor-like footprint pulling the line high.

Amateurs regularly do stuff like this... It's silly to assume a state level
actor couldn't do the same or better.

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tehjoker
I understand in the abstract why the US is freaking out about China as their
economy is eclipsing the US and they are starting to create a competing
international order to the WTO/IMF type deal with the belt and road
initiative. However, I don't understand exactly what is triggering the
national security establishment's (usually stupid and deadly) sudden paranoia
about China.

Many people I know simply see these headlines and start to see China as an
official enemy. I don't understand why we should see them that way at all. The
official enemies of the US are typically brutalized in various ways and
slandered in the media. It is difficult to know what is to be taken at face
value.

~~~
jorblumesea
I think the concern is that a nation that has literal concentration camps and
exhibits any-western thought and agendas is going to become a major power.

China is hardly going to "eclipse" the US. I think the concern is less
economic and more geopolitical. It should worry the West that a highly
authoritarian nation is becoming wealthy and powerful.

It's a reasonable concern, I think. Once China gets hard geopolitical power it
will start to export its own way of thinking, just as the US did. But unlike
the US, which at least in theory believes in basic rights, China is a literal
authoritarian surveillance state with no such values.

I worry that state run concentration camps like those in xinjiang will become
normalized.

~~~
tehjoker
Yea, China definitely has problems no question about that. Xinjiang is one of
the points I am most concerned with. However, the US doesn't take actions
based on anything resembling goodwill towards others (we have a network of
torture stations and kidnapping black sites don't forget). In many important
ways, the US can be described as highly authoritarian, particularly when it
comes to foreign policy (witness combinations of illegal invasions, brutal
sanctions, and sometimes decisive support for death squads in Panama,
Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq, Guatemala, etc).

I do think the world should bring more attention to Xinjing, but I don't think
escalating tensions is going to do anything worthwhile (especially when I
haven't heard a whit about the trade war being sanctions for humanitarian
violations). The trade war is also not going to help American workers, capital
controls would do that though.

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mfer
1) malicious actors get information from multiple sources and combine them. We
talk about this with data sets that are leaked. I wonder what that means for
things like this and China as a state actor

2) contractors on military projects are highly regulated. I wonder if any laws
or contractual agreements were broken by this

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SudoEpoch
I've read several articles on this issue. It doesnt appear they are even doing
the pick and place. They are just manufacturing the PCB. My opinion is it's a
non issue that some politics have arisen.

~~~
galangalalgol
Wouldn't it still be possible to guess a lot about the design and find
potentially exploitable mistakes? Or to build defects into the traces so that
they fail in use due to vibration, temperature, or poor mutual inductance?
Transmitters do seem far too difficult to get working in a shielded
environment and prone to discovery.

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kevin_thibedeau
If I were China I would take steps to ensure the boards degrade after some
years. That would ensure they pass inspection and get installed. Then the
parts can start falling off.

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benj111
As far as I was aware, the UK didn't have access to the source code for it's
own jets anyway. Does it make much difference if yet another nation adds it's
own backdoors?

[https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2009/11/us-to-keep-jca-
source...](https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2009/11/us-to-keep-jca-source-code/)

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crististm
Leaving all the real espionage possibilities aside, I wonder if this is not a
modern day propaganda machine doing its job.

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myrandomcomment
One instance of a single part of any device being tampered with by the Chinese
government would be enough to cause every western company to move all
production out of China.

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banku_brougham
Reminds me of Battlestar Galactica first episode, except with terrestrial jets
instead of battlestars and vipers.

------
oceanghost
Does this feel like propaganda to anyone else?

~~~
noir_lord
The weird thing with propaganda is that it can often be completely true in
each part but represent a lie in totality.

You run ten completely truthful stories about X doing something but no stories
about Y doing the same thing.

The perception then becomes skewed towards Y.

Is manufacturing a PCB in China for a critical piece of defense equipment a
security risk, possibly, it's also a possibility the same is true if they made
that PCB in France or Israel or Japan (though I'm sure the threat curve is
different).

The other questions I'm curious about are things like, ignoring the F-35, how
much other equipment in service is dependent on Chinese manufacturers -
electronics are everywhere and China is the nations factory (of sub-assemblies
at least).

~~~
darkpuma
> _" The weird thing with propaganda is that it can often be completely true
> in each part but represent a lie in totality."_

Propaganda can also straight up tell the truth. Propaganda, contrary to the
impression given to many put through the public school system, is not a
synonym for "lie". Propaganda is often lies, but being dishonest is not a
defining characteristic of propaganda.

One famous example: _Loose lips sink ships._ Okay, maybe that's a bit
exaggerated, but it's generally pretty true. In a war, breaches in secrecy can
easily cost lives. Those loose lips posters were still unambiguously
propaganda though.

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canada_dry
Let's turn around the discussion... if Russia had decided to outsource the
PCB's for some new stealth fighter to a US manufacturer you can bet that
several cloak-and-dagger US agencies would be looking for any way possible to
compromise and take advantage of the opportunity.

~~~
ajross
Maybe, but their hands would be tied by the fact that a PCB isn't a very
effective way to do that kind of espionage.

I'm not saying there's no possible conflict of interest here or that China
wouldn't try something or that we should continue to use Shenzhen Fastprint
for circuit boards to go in our super premium fancy stealth doodads.

I'm saying this is stupid and a non-issue and people should calm down.

~~~
canada_dry
> isn't a very effective way to do that kind of espionage

If you know very little about someone, just examining their laundry will tell
you quite a bit about them. So 'effective' is really relative.

And, I'd argue that just having their hands on a physical component gives them
the ability to introduce purposeful exotic flaws which they can exploit, or
just ensure failure sometime in the future yet aren't detectable by standard
quality control methods. Kinda like 'zero-day' code flaws that are kept in
ones back pocket until needed.

