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View Full Version : Chinese trojan kill switch in electronic components.



tb888
24th December, 2008, 03:54 AM
Most of the things we use in the west are made in Peoples Republic of China including electronics. I've read alot of articles on how they chinese could easily be implementing kill switchs (disable the component) deep inside the components which they could activate in a time of war for example. Something like this happened towards the collapase of the USSR, the Americans managed to destroy part of a Russian oil pipeline by seeting them up with software designed to destroy the pipeline. It caused the biggest non-nuclear man made explosion ever. Interesting concept.

ussr pipeline links -
Siberian pipeline sabotage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage)
WashPost: CIA slipped bugs to Soviets - Washington Post- msnbc.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002)

chinese kill switch:
Pentagon fears trojans, kill switches in foreign-made CPUs (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080502-pentagon-fears-manchurian-chips.html)
Could China install 'kill switches' in military microchips? | FP Passport (http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8782)

opsmonkey
24th December, 2008, 04:48 AM
its very possible..

i know C++ programmers that have built 'faults' into their software so that periodically business's that have bought their software have to call them out to 'fix' issues.. leading to call out charges etc..

GoliaBC
24th December, 2008, 07:25 PM
It seems an epidemic!
My phone, which is a Sony Ericsson (made in China) broke just 1 day after the contract with my phone company ran out!!! This makes me think that it might have a chip programmed to make the phone break just a the end of the contract, something like an expiring date, so you have to buy a new one! That is how the make money I guess.

We are far too dependent from china these days!!!

opsmonkey
24th December, 2008, 10:14 PM
We are far too dependent from china these days!!!

i agree.. i have to eat out at Yo Yo Beijing in Lincoln at least once a week

tenbobdylan
28th December, 2008, 10:28 AM
wow that sounds like some one has merged the plots of the world is not enough and a view to a kill into one easy to follow bs package (arh mr Bond).

say the chiness or anyone else for that matter had implmented such devices into the electrionic they make, why wait to set them off?, there has been times all ready were if such a plan was in the works then it would has almost certainly been put into action by now.

o hang on thought maybe there is some truth in what you say, every time an xbox 360 is put to gether maybe a kill switch is wired into it so when the poeple of china ,tiwain ,japan or were ever get pissed off they press a button an yes we get another Three Red Rings of Death.

Biohazard4
28th December, 2008, 11:59 AM
its a global conspiracy i tell u!!!

:D

thered
28th December, 2008, 03:04 PM
what a load of 5hite


i have bought many things from china and most ~~~~ up after a few weeks so to say they have made chips that will self destruct may be true after all everything else they do breaks straight away

bodaccea
28th December, 2008, 04:09 PM
i wouldnt worry too much. Quality of stuff from there is awful. methinks instead of a big bang you would more likely get a little puff

tb888
29th December, 2008, 12:03 AM
First off, the chinese are in fact an ally, so they naturally wouldn't have been set off (why would that even make sense?). Although if we decalared war on china right now, they would probably win (although we'd all come out pretty bad). The thing about this 'kill switch' is that it would be practically undetectable, we are talking IC level here. Given that almost all of our mass produced electronics (and everything else) are produced in the PRC, this wouldn't be hard to do (and the advantage in a time of war would be a game changer) - the Americans done stuff like this all the time during the cold war. You would just have to poison the components btw.

Let me elaborate on this theroy, we are talking about anything that talks to the internet - you can make the ICs respond to certain system states that could be acheived from data received from the outside. I'm not talking about a remote control kill switch.

Who said anything about explosions or bangs? you are talking about the ability to disable air defense, radar - they just need to stop working.

I don't really believe this idea to be honest, I just though it would be interesting topic for this section of the site.

caveman_nige
26th February, 2009, 12:43 PM
Out of all the BS in this section this thread is the only one that is plausible and has merit.. A very interesting read..

RedSpider
26th February, 2009, 12:54 PM
i don't believe this theory although i do find it intriguing.
surely there must be somebody who makes a living repairing these electronics who might notice something out of place.especially if they believe something like this and are looking for evidence to prove it.
i wouldn't imagine that if a war happens then the first thing the chinese would do would be to flick a switch and declare 'right... no more tv for you then'.
its more likely to me that if such a killswitch exists then it would purely be to ensure that products dont too long and forcing you to part with more money.
just like them cheeky micriosoft buggers. i've never heard of anyone having a xbox360 that lasted more than 12-18 months before dying. most people don't know or just plain don't bother to have them repair or replace them as they're obliged to by law within 3 years.

maxi1968
3rd March, 2009, 04:56 PM
china would never dare install trojan kill switch into any export goods as the uk and usa.as we and the us are there biggest trading partners.anyway every other country in the region hates them.

alunfennell
4th March, 2009, 06:33 PM
I have worked in electronics manufacturing for over ten year and before that IBM & Minolta and I can tell you that certain practics take place within different companys that would confirm the above & its not only the Peoples Republic of China that are responsable for this shady practice !

As most of you know nearly every big company out sources not only there manufacturing but also the technical support, both of which are designed to make money, technical support for such thing like servers are on a subscription bases service (or services like Apple Care) you pay for the privilage.

Some companys use materials edited with intermitent bugs to keep call centers busy and has been the practice for years ! nothing serious of course and not every item is designed to do so just one or two in every batch.

Since the start of call centers used by companys to increase revenue this has been happening and will continue to do so !

Regards:
Alun

cataha
3rd May, 2009, 05:11 AM
Most of the things we use in the west are made in Peoples Republic of China including electronics. I've read alot of articles on how they chinese could easily be implementing kill switchs (disable the component) deep inside the components which they could activate in a time of war for example. Something like this happened towards the collapase of the USSR, the Americans managed to destroy part of a Russian oil pipeline by seeting them up with software designed to destroy the pipeline. It caused the biggest non-nuclear man made explosion ever. Interesting concept.

ussr pipeline links -
Siberian pipeline sabotage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage)
WashPost: CIA slipped bugs to Soviets - Washington Post- msnbc.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002)

chinese kill switch:
Pentagon fears trojans, kill switches in foreign-made CPUs (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080502-pentagon-fears-manchurian-chips.html)
Could China install 'kill switches' in military microchips? | FP Passport (http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8782)


I worked for major company "UNNAMED", 60-70% of people in world use and will use. The point is, it has a back door that can only be open with knowledge of it's existents and without owners knowledge at the time of use, and i was in that team.... so i know when somebody says of such maybe, i know for sure there is.

xant14
3rd May, 2009, 05:36 AM
There was a prog on telly last year ish about the indian burgler alarm installer. He set the electronics to cause the alarm to malfunction after the warranty ran out, maybe 14 months after install. Then when called out to 'repair' it. reset it for another 14 months or so.

things are made to die nowadays, deliberate poor quality components. Some interesting stories on the service centre and tech centres.

acestu
16th June, 2009, 12:36 AM
So am i getting this right...:

If we ever get to war with China they are going to win by automatically turning off our vacuum cleaners and microwaves with embedded KILL switches... My god we should be scared

What do you think Churchill ?

OH Yes !!



Acestu

P.S. somebody has been sniffing the pritt again !

chroma
26th June, 2009, 09:47 PM
Nah this is all speculation, software is very, very easily reverse engineered.

Looking through the dissasembled code i can tell what a program is supposed to do and spot anything that seems out of place.

With so many hobbyists and enthusiasts dissassembling things all round the world then the reports would come flooding in in a matter of seconds.

The Russians or the Germans would be plausable because those guys know how to write some seriously tight efficient code (their computer scientists are really in a league of their own) Korean, Chinese and Japanese programmers are essentialy bushleaague cut and pasters.


its very possible..

i know C++ programmers that have built 'faults' into their software so that periodically business's that have bought their software have to call them out to 'fix' issues.. leading to call out charges etc..
Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.

Its my primary language though regardless of its nightmarish ability to get really buggy really fast.

acestu
14th July, 2009, 11:46 PM
Apparantley if you look close enough at a packet of rizzla there are in fact secret messages embedded by the commies....

Fact

acestu

chroma
19th July, 2009, 01:46 AM
Apparantley if you look close enough at a packet of rizzla there are in fact secret messages embedded by the commies....

Fact

acestu

This is only readily visable when under the influence of albert hoffmans problem child however ;)

Blender
28th October, 2009, 10:19 PM
A very interesting thread.

Im open to the idea but my immediate opinion is that its the poor quality of components in electrical goods mean things break only just out of warranty, rather than some kill switch.

Happens all the time. These companies know how long their items will last, they're not stupid.

But if there was a shread of hard evidence i'd easily change my mind and buy british. (although quite where you can buy a british microwave now I have no idea)

retsu
28th October, 2009, 11:28 PM
this is quite interesting thread, but if its real, i doubt that only china would do that at the matter of fact i dont doubt that other countries on the world would gonna try that just in case of "emergency"

timo1
29th October, 2009, 01:02 AM
I think one of the previous posters mentioned quality of components. This I would imagine would be the easiest way to disable systems of any sort with a no conspiracy blame attached to it to increase revenue. Then just close the company and restart under a different name.
During the Falklands conflict wasn't there a rumour that the French had a Kill switch on their exocet missiles & they refused to share. Their sales went up substantially I believe after the missiles were shown to be so effective against modern Warships of the time.
I believe kill switches were discussed in "The Reg" last year where they were talking about BT buying switch gear from China instead of Marconi & how in the case of a confrontation with the Peoples republic they could disable the UK financially & communication wide without firing a shot by switching these off (by phone). They cover it in much more paranoid detail than I have here if anyone wants to search it out.

forntida
30th October, 2009, 02:52 PM
I worked for major company "UNNAMED", 60-70% of people in world use and will use. The point is, it has a back door that can only be open with knowledge of it's existents and without owners knowledge at the time of use, and i was in that team.... so i know when somebody says of such maybe, i know for sure there is.

What?:alberteinstein:



Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.

It is more likely that programs are put on the market before they are tested to the full. You can't teach logic. It is easy to follow all the language requirements and get a program compiled, yet the program could have flawed logic. The compiler only compiles according to the language. Programs are bloody useless if they are not written to carry out all the tasks required. You have to write a program that will do all that is required without logical mistakes then test under all possible uses.

We recently had a case of the Daewoo PVR which would not work properly with countless faults. To me it looked as if the hard disk was still showing deleted programs on the FAT. Programs were scattered all over the place like a fragmented disk. Daewoo 'sorted' the problem by taking out the record 'series' option. They should have sent it back to the programmers. That fault should not have passed program testing.

chroma
30th October, 2009, 11:10 PM
I worked for major company "UNNAMED", 60-70% of people in world use and will use. The point is, it has a back door that can only be open with knowledge of it's existents and without owners knowledge at the time of use, and i was in that team.... so i know when somebody says of such maybe, i know for sure there is.

What?:alberteinstein:



Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.

It is more likely that programs are put on the market before they are tested to the full. You can't teach logic. It is easy to follow all the language requirements and get a program compiled, yet the program could have flawed logic. The compiler only compiles according to the language. Programs are bloody useless if they are not written to carry out all the tasks required. You have to write a program that will do all that is required without logical mistakes then test under all possible uses.

We recently had a case of the Daewoo PVR which would not work properly with countless faults. To me it looked as if the hard disk was still showing deleted programs on the FAT. Programs were scattered all over the place like a fragmented disk. Daewoo 'sorted' the problem by taking out the record 'series' option. They should have sent it back to the programmers. That fault should not have passed program testing.

Its an endemic problem with the entire software industry which amounts to not much more than battery farms.
Your given an insane deadline to ship from the idiots upstairs in marketing and managment and the whole ethos is "if its shit we can hopefully patch it later."

Then theres user error, as in people using CD trays as cup holders and the like, which im sure is just a plain old urban myth, but the point is users do try and use things for completely unrelated purposes. Errors down to this are forgivable in my opinion, a coder cant possibly forsee some of the punihment his work will have to endure from the bottomless well of end user stupidity.

The point i was making with C/C++ is that as a project grows in complexity you enevitably wind up doing stupid things like inline assembly and micromanaging memory that other high level languages dont want to let you near (and for good reason, subtle changes on a low level can have tremendous and often inexplicable ripple effects throughout the code)
Other languages that have automatad garbage collection and the like dont suffer from this problem.

Sometimes it feels like you need to be some kind of idiot savant to even attempt to dereference then overload a pointer because it can have mindboggling effects to the rest of the code, especialy when the object doesnt nessisarily exist yet or has a null value.

forntida
31st October, 2009, 12:48 AM
What?:alberteinstein:



Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.

It is more likely that programs are put on the market before they are tested to the full. You can't teach logic. It is easy to follow all the language requirements and get a program compiled, yet the program could have flawed logic. The compiler only compiles according to the language. Programs are bloody useless if they are not written to carry out all the tasks required. You have to write a program that will do all that is required without logical mistakes then test under all possible uses.

We recently had a case of the Daewoo PVR which would not work properly with countless faults. To me it looked as if the hard disk was still showing deleted programs on the FAT. Programs were scattered all over the place like a fragmented disk. Daewoo 'sorted' the problem by taking out the record 'series' option. They should have sent it back to the programmers. That fault should not have passed program testing.

Its an endemic problem with the entire software industry which amounts to not much more than battery farms.
Your given an insane deadline to ship from the idiots upstairs in marketing and managment and the whole ethos is "if its shit we can hopefully patch it later."

Then theres user error, as in people using CD trays as cup holders and the like, which im sure is just a plain old urban myth, but the point is users do try and use things for completely unrelated purposes. Errors down to this are forgivable in my opinion, a coder cant possibly forsee some of the punihment his work will have to endure from the bottomless well of end user stupidity.

The point i was making with C/C++ is that as a project grows in complexity you enevitably wind up doing stupid things like inline assembly and micromanaging memory that other high level languages dont want to let you near (and for good reason, subtle changes on a low level can have tremendous and often inexplicable ripple effects throughout the code)
Other languages that have automatad garbage collection and the like dont suffer from this problem.

Sometimes it feels like you need to be some kind of idiot savant to even attempt to dereference then overload a pointer because it can have mindboggling effects to the rest of the code, especialy when the object doesnt nessisarily exist yet or has a null value.[/QUOTE]

I know what you mean. These things did not happen when programs were written in assembly and you did not have to use code like some of the dubious windows procedures\functions because of time constraints. Remember in my day meeses were not in general use.:roflmao:

karlpowell
1st November, 2009, 08:03 AM
I remember read something like this a good few years ago with a big VCR company putting a life-timer on one of there products so when it reached a certain age it just died. may have been Phillips but im not 100%

jojo1212
16th August, 2010, 04:55 PM
i agree.. i have to eat out at Yo Yo Beijing in Lincoln at least once a week

been there once and its great

autolocksmiths
17th August, 2010, 08:41 AM
Many Chinese companies are intentionally produce low-quality equipment. Looks cheap, but it is expensive.

tuningschool
17th August, 2010, 09:09 AM
another poor 3d about mass media piloting.

sookha
17th August, 2010, 09:12 AM
These people are working verry hard !
And i think if you work hard you deserve to benefit

betonel
17th August, 2010, 06:42 PM
Chinese know to clone things better than placing a backdoor. They don't even need to do this or start any war. The war is already won as far as they have our money for their cheap garbage.
I hate them.

clearly
19th August, 2010, 07:54 PM
dont underestamet the chinise

if you look at were they are they are on fire

:celticparty:

shawlynot
24th September, 2010, 12:14 PM
i agree.. i have to eat out at Yo Yo Beijing in Lincoln at least once a week

:eating: cheap good clean food! love the food there :)

patkins
24th September, 2010, 11:15 PM
Just slightly off thread but as I have stated before on DK.... have you ever wondered what all those updates to your computer really are?
Visited a hardware shop recently in the middle of a power outage. Staff had no computers and were befuddled having to write receipts and generally add cost of items.
Just how free is free software?
The point I`m making is could freeware contain spyware etc.
Why is so much of our transport computer dependent?
And could it all grind to a halt at the flick of a switch?
Remember...the reason we are here on DK is all thanks to the mad ideas of Arthur C. Clarke.

manxspud
25th September, 2010, 05:33 PM
Could this be why when i logged on today i saw this :

http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/7636/googlechina2.jpg (http://img814.imageshack.us/i/googlechina2.jpg/)

And the news is reporting these appearing all over the globe :

http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/6104/trojanmosque.jpg (http://img512.imageshack.us/i/trojanmosque.jpg/)

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/4793/trojanpinata.jpg (http://img693.imageshack.us/i/trojanpinata.jpg/)

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/3374/woodpigtrojan.jpg (http://img710.imageshack.us/i/woodpigtrojan.jpg/)

Its already started m8's

z786
28th September, 2010, 12:55 AM
mate, wait till you see what an Android phone is capable of, even iphone 4

manxspud
28th September, 2010, 05:29 AM
Already have m8 ... scary stuff :

http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/4939/iphonetransformer.jpg (http://img210.imageshack.us/i/iphonetransformer.jpg/)

and :

http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/4172/transformerscellphone.jpg (http://img825.imageshack.us/i/transformerscellphone.jpg/)

lol @manx

Mally_BUK
17th October, 2010, 10:24 PM
i can't see how disabling my toaster would help them win a war