FBI Concerned About Implications of Counterfeit Cisco Gear

SpicyBrownMustard writes "An FBI PowerPoint presentation provides details about a criminal investigation into counterfeit CISCO hardware originating from China, and sold by Gold/Silver partners to numerous US government, military, and intelligence agencies. The concern of the article's author and the FBI is that the counterfeit equipment may be state-sponsored to aid in accessing otherwise secure systems (slides 46+47). Says the article author: 'The threat is real. Compromised hardware of potentially hostile foreign origin sits within secure networks of the US government, military, and intelligence services. And as you now see, the FBI has been concerned about it.'" We've mentioned the seizure of some of this equipment before, but this presentation adds quite a bit of detail, and highlights the FBI's concern of Chinese government involvement.

The FBI Followed Up With

[neoform (551705)]

It's not fair, if people are using the Chineese pre-wiretapped routers, we can't get people to use OUR specially pre-wiretapped routers!

Re:The FBI Followed Up With

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Don't Cisco make the routers used in the Great Firewall of China? There's probably just a flag somewhere in IOS saying which government to send the logs to...

Re:

[zappepcs (820751)]

Your joke is exactly why I'm starting to play with Vyatta http://www.vyatta.com/ [vyatta.com] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyatta [wikipedia.org] to get away from the alphabet soup of groups that want to know what happens inside my home without my knowledge. Performance is pretty good for small office/home networks and leaves you quite a few options if playing with computers is your hobby.

Nightmare

[chrome (3506)]

This is a complete and utter nightmare, for so many reasons. You start to mistrust the routers in your network, then you should also distrust most of the tools in your arsenal. Can you trust that laptop? What about the chipset in that laptop? Can you trust the copy of GCC you have?

This is going to keep a lot of people awake at night.

Re:Nightmare

[Arccot (1115809)]

This is a complete and utter nightmare, for so many reasons. You start to mistrust the routers in your network, then you should also distrust most of the tools in your arsenal. Can you trust that laptop? What about the chipset in that laptop? Can you trust the copy of GCC you have? This is going to keep a lot of people awake at night.

Indeed. Even if you tried to flash the firmware on your routers to clean them, who is to say the "bad" firmware isn't designed to look like it was flashed, but really do nothing to get rid of any backdoors?

If you can't trust the hardware, you can't trust anything. Scary stuff.

Re:

[samkass (174571)]

It doesn't even have to be a sniffer or anything. They could simply have put something in the power supplies such that some sort of signal (maybe from a satellite?) would trigger all the routers to turn off, or something in any of the ASIC that would fry them on command. Just as our carriers are rushing to Taiwan's defense, *poof* all C2, logistics, and situational awareness capabilities revert to the early 20th century.

Re:

[neoform (551705)]

The solution: Buy a router from every major router maker, then use them all chain-linked together. That way you get super-ultra firewall protection.. and unless the Chinese AND the NSA are working together, you can't be hacked! FLAWLESS VICTORY!

Re:Nightmare

[sm62704 (957197)]

You can only trust software that you have examined the code and compiled yourself, and people you trust who have examined and compiled the code themselves.

I trust neither Cisco nor the FBI.

Re:Nightmare

[sconeu (64226)]

But can you trust the compiler [cmu.edu]?

Re:Nightmare

[neoform (551705)]

I trust neither Cisco nor the FBI.

On an unrelated note, ever since the NSA started giving me free Cisco routers, I can't help but think they're just honest guys trying to help out regular Joes like me.

Re:Nightmare

[jdunn14 (455930)]

It's really nothing new, and there is no real solution other than you have to trust someone at some point. For an entertaining paper about this exact problem in the software world, check out "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson [cmu.edu]

Re:

[TheLink (130905)]

The grey hairs are because even your very DNA is being subverted and counterfeited.

That's what you get with cheap clones.

Just wait till Monsanto and friends catch up with you. Unauthorized reproduction and all that.

Re:Nightmare

[demachina (71715)]

I think you are just getting a dose of turn about is fair play. The CIA and NSA have tampered with electronics being sold to America's adversaries for years. Countries like China and Brazil have zero confidence in Windows because of the possibility of back doors allowing the NSA and CIA access, which is why Linux is so popular in these countries, especially for government use.

I'm not exactly sure why counterfeit Cisco routers are considered more of a security threat than real Cisco routers since Cisco, like a lot of American companies, are outsourcing so much of their hardware manufacture and software development to China. The Chinese government can just as easily put an agent in to any of these companies and slip back doors in to the real products.

All in all this is just the price you pay for exploiting cheap labor in a country that has been a bitter adversary for the last 60 years.

Re:Nightmare

[ZorroXXX (610877)]

I think you are just getting a dose of turn about is fair play.

I would rather call this unfair play.

The CIA and NSA have tampered with electronics being sold to America's adversaries for years.

I hate USA for forcing the yellow dots [eff.org] "feature" on all colour laserjet printers, making it (almost?) impossible to buy one without, even when I do not live in USA.

I mean, one thing is what a government does to its own citicents; it sort of have authority to do whatever it wants except as limited by international agreements. But one country should not be able to force its own politics upon other countries. Just recently usage of wi-fi has been restricted in Russia [slashdot.org]. What if a country, say Burma, made usage of wi-fi illegal, should then other countries suddenly be forced to make it illegal as well?

As my old HP Laserjet 6L is clearly showing its age on the printouts, I am currently actively searching for a replacement and would like to have a colour laserjet. Does anyone have tips for getting an affordable one, without the yellow dots?

Re:Nightmare

[aurispector (530273)]

Agree. And don't forget the chinese have been the beacons of freedom for the last 60 years, spreading democracy and human rights at every turn.

Re:Nightmare

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

> This is going to keep a lot of people awake at night.

As well it should, because they never should have allowed the production of critical national-security infrastructure components to be outsourced in the first place. Now that they've dug themselves into an impossibly deep hole, they're going to start complaining that the view sucks.

I think the first thing that needs to happen, is that some agency (the NSA seems the most suited) needs to create and bootstrap 'reference platforms' for various architectures. Create a secure compiler chain from the ground up, auditing code the whole way. There's no other way to be sure that you're not just compiling in backdoors, otherwise.

Then with that accomplished -- and it would need to be done for every architecture that needs to be secured -- they'd at least have a secure toolset and compiler chain to vet COTS code with. (It goes without saying that any product that doesn't come with source code, and which can't be compiled on a secure compiler and then have that object code loaded in and run, should be immediately removed from the secure infrastructure. It's beyond broken.)

It would be a major effort, and probably a large shift in scope for the agency put in charge of it, but I think the problem is too important to do anything less. The economic, political, and military security of nations is going to rest firmly on electronic infrastructure, and we need to make the trustworthiness of that infrastructure a national priority.

Re:Nightmare

[chrome (3506)]

Yeah, I agree 100% here. It will never happen of course, because real, serious threats like this get brushed under the rug while other, spurious ones get an inordinate amount of attention, almost as if to say, he look! we're doing something.

Re:

[evanbd (210358)]

How much more tax money are you willing to spend? 10x? 100x? What about for the stuff that's important, but not national security important? Are you willing to live with the fact that the results will cost 100x as much and be 1/10th the speed? The government has been there and done that, at least for some sorts of components, and decided it couldn't afford to. Now, they might be wrong, but they might not be. It might be cheaper and easier to attempt to make the commercial gear secure, realize that won

Re:Nightmare

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

Are you willing to live with the fact that the results will cost 100x as much and be 1/10th the speed? The government has been there and done that, at least for some sorts of components, and decided it couldn't afford to. Now, they might be wrong, but they might not be.

I guess it was implicit in my earlier post that no, I don't think they're right about that. I think they're really, really wrong, and I think the litany of security breaches we've seen in the public sector over the past few years, and the ones I expect to see in the future, are an indictment of the dominant mindset in government IT procurement.

If we want to take advantage of electronic information-processing technologies, we need to find ways of making them secure. If we can't do that, then we shouldn't use the technology. Security shouldn't be optional: either it's feasible to do something securely, or it's too expensive, in which case the system shouldn't be constructed and alternatives should be considered, including not automating at all.

I would quite frankly rather see large sections of the government switch back to using paper, which at least the average member of the civil service has a clue about securing, than use electronic systems that aren't secure -- and worse than that, that the users don't realize aren't secure.

It might be cheaper and easier to attempt to make the commercial gear secure, realize that won't completely work, and deal with the occasional problem -- even at a national security level.

You're right, it might be. But how do you quantify a potential national-security risk? It's possible to try and come up with after-the-fact estimates, but even then they're subject to a lot of guesswork. [1] Even something not normally considered to be a 'secure' system -- stuff like contracts-management, procurement, or contractor payroll -- could be used to effectively shut down or render ineffective large swaths of the government by an adversary who was interested in exploiting it.

These costs need to be weighed very, very carefully, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that they aren't. Not even close. It's pants-shittingly bad in some cases, and the decisions are being made by people who are (in addition to frequently being just plain incompetent) so far down the chain of responsibility that they only consider the impact that a particular decision might have to their fiefdom. There is precious little in the way of coordination, and the sooner that changes, the better.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

[1] Just as an example, how would you go about trying to quantify 9/11? You could come up with the direct costs of the increased airline security, the DHS, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but how do you quantify the lives lost? The economic damage? The people who decided not to get on planes, or the time spent waiting in longer lines? Then after that, you'd get into arguments about whether the event could be linked to the dollar's slide, or if that's totally independent, which might be another cost. The point being: it's difficult to quantify even afterwards what the costs of a particular event are; how are you going to quantify them for a potential event?

Really

[TheRealMindChild (743925)]

Really, if it is *that much* of a concern, quit buying from a third party vendor. License a spec, rent a manufacturing facility, put some people to work, and create your own Cisco Certified Uber Network Gear eXtreme, Uncle Sam Edition

Time for state-sponsored fablabs

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

I can think and think over it, there seems to be but one solution:
Now is time for US Department of Sensitive Things to stop buying hardware and start buying blueprints. Buy VHDL and CAD files from CISCO, scrutinize them for threats then produce it yourselves.

China is great for cheap production but there is a reason why military approved stuff are more expensive : among other resons, you can't let anyone build them.
And if you want certified and cheap stuff, it is time to begin building robotic factories.

Re:Time for state-sponsored fablabs

[Lonedar (897073)]

Ah, yes. A robotic factory would be a great solution to this problem indeed.
In order to cut the costs to a bare minimum I recommend we order the robots from China.

Uhhh...

[Kingrames (858416)]

Who cares about counterfeit Disco gear?

Re:

[everphilski (877346)]

Disco Stu only buys the genuine article. Oh yea, baby...

Not a good decision

[hyades1 (1149581)]

The economic integration between North America and Communist China is putting us in a very dangerous position. The Chinese government has a well-documented history of utter ruthlessness, and will happily steal and duplicate every technological edge it can get. Does anybody believe even for a moment that the same people who have committed and facilitated cold-blooded mass murder on a scale we find difficult to imagine will draw the line at a little industrial espionage?

Corporations that are forcing us into closer and closer economic contact with China are making huge profits, and doing a good job of ensuring that our governments obediently facilitate economic integration. For the rest of us, this means stagnant wages and limited opportunities...all in return for access to cheap headphones, lead-poisoned toys and other gimcrackery.

The Chinese government is not our friend, and the argument that exposing them to the joy of capitalism will make their society free is exactly backwards.

Oh No!

[UncleWilly (1128141)]

I also suspect my Lenovo/Thinkpad..whenever I'm in the room it seems to be...watching me.

Really? ebay?

[esocid (946821)]

...originating from China, and sold by Gold/Silver partners to numerous US government, military, and intelligence agencies

Are our government agencies seriously buying anything from ebay? I'm not even sure how legal, much less smart, it is to buy equipment that will be used in a federal agency from joe blow, or even kim lee (equivalent of jow blow) in china. An average user probably wouldn't have to worry, if in fact the stuff worked, but the Pentagon may have a problem.
To any federal agency monitoring this (NSA), please stop buying your network and computing gear from yard sales and ebay.

Closed Systems and Black Boxes

[hackus (159037)]

Security cannot be achieved with closed source or closed hardware. The problem of security is too difficult, so it is best to create a "culture" of security based around a simple set of rules:

1) All software implemented in Network Systems must be open and source code must be peer reviewed on a regular basis.

2)Hardware should be as generic as possible and should be built upon agreed standards so you can mix and match components.

3) Cultural security is laid at the foundations of software and hardware. Once everyone knows the foundations any single individual or group will find it very hard to con an entire community.

Even if they succeed it will not take long for the culture to detect the deception.

Personally, I am glad the Chinese are screwing Cisco. Remember folks, we are talking about the same company that sold the Chinese government a ton of security products to hunt down and kill/torture or imprison political dissidents.

Last year I got rid of the final pieces of Cisco gear in my network and everything is working just fine with Open Source equivalents.

I peer review my own patch updates, and follow the lists carefully as the comminity as a whole deals with coding the upgrades.

I really do know what my routers are doing.

How many here can say that?

-Hack

Supposed to Be the Other Way Around

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Clinton and the Republican 1990s Congress sold us Most Favored Nation and "Fast Track" status for China on the appeal that the US would be manufacturing high-tech gear like Cisco routers and selling it into the emerging Chinese market. Making China dependent on US manufacturing and retailers so we could dictate political terms to them, like not torturing Tibetan monks.

They got it. Then they flipped the script. Now the US is dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Stepping up the game, Bush and the Republican 2000s Congress sent us $9 TRILLION into Federal debt (after a Clinton left him with a surplus), making $400 BILLION in debt bought by China necessary to keep the illusion that our economy hasn't collapsed - an illusion rapidly vaporizing, even before China applies much pressure to force us to comply with their Communist mafia government's global expansion plans. Meanwhile the Chinese are not just torturing monks (or stopping us from torturing around the world), they're also sending weapons, including machetes, to fuel a slaughter in Zimbabwe [independent.co.uk].

They baited and switched us. And by "they", I mean a lot of Americans with Washington addresses, and now obviously Chinese bank accounts.

It gets worse

[WindBourne (631190)]

China in return agreed to allow their money to float free, but created "the basket" that they then control to an unknown formula. Considering that yuan has gone up a whopping 17% against the dollar over 5 years, while most other moneies have gone up more than 100%, it says a lot. In addition, they were required to drop their tariffs over 2 years ago (they asked for 5-7 years). We are now pushing 8 and they are asking for another 3-5 years of them.

The good news is that EU has seen what has happened to us and is pushing several issues; 1) the chinese firewall and the tariffs 2) the money issue 3) the carbon issue. As such, they are about to slap a major carbon tax on everything based on their Point of origin as well as a tariff against chinese good because of the firewall and tariffs.

Don't forget Huawei

[HockeyPuck (141947)]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/29/cisco_huawei_case_ends/ [theregister.co.uk]

While Cisco dropped this lawsuit claiming "a victory for the protection of intellectual property rights."

This was after Huawai photocopied IOS Configuration guides and "portions of its IOS source code found its way into Huawei's operating system for its Quidway routers and switches. Cisco claimed the Huawei OS included text strings, files names and bugs that were identical with Cisco's IOS source code. The suit alleges that Huawei is infringing at least five Cisco patents."

*RING BELL* Round 2

They should have known it all along.

[gnutoo (1154137)]

They should be afraid of the genuine article too. Only free software can be audited, modified and trusted.

Re:They should have known it all along.

[evanbd (210358)]

If you're a government customer with national security concerns, you can audit the source to commercial products as well. It's frequently a requirement, and the government is too large a customer. Of course, the code stays closed to the general public.

Re:They should have known it all along.

[sjames (1099)]

The thing is, if they are auditing the hardware and software, they can as easily validate the fake Ciscos as the real ones. They're made in the same factory by the same people.

If they cannot validate the fake ones, then they should be just as afraid of the real ones.

Re:They should have known it all along.

[sjames (1099)]

The trouble is they can't validate EVERY unit they buy. They test out one model number and firmware revision and then expect every unit like that to be identical. With Fakes the assumption is no longer valid.

The only difference between the fakes and the real thing is a contractural arrangement. They can't trust the real Cisco products made at the same factory by the same people any more than they trust the fakes.

Sounds like they should demand infrastructure componants made in the U.S.

That's not good enough.

[gnutoo (1154137)]

Even the Federal Government is not as big as the free software community. If they are not free to modify the source for any purpose and share those modifications with everyone else in a free way, they lose the benefits of freedom and become an unpaid bug fixer for Cisco. Malice can slip through in obfuscated form, they can't make it do what they want and they will have a hard time being sure what they audit is what they run.

Re:That's not good enough.

[Tsar (536185)]

Even the Federal Government is not as big as the free software community.

Back in 2000, there were about 13,500 developers in the free software community [firstmonday.org]. And now they outnumber the federal government's three million employees [energy.gov]? That's quite a growth spurt!

Do you have a silly walk as well?

Validating pre-built products

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

That works better for software than for hardware. After you've checked the VHDL for back doors, how do you tell that the actual device matches it? You either have your own fab or you look at millions of transistors under a microscope. And the recent Usenix paper showed that it takes very few gates to put a remote root backdoor into a CPU.

Not true. The new FIPS regulations change that.

[CFD339 (795926)]

Under FIPS, not only must the vendor use specific encryption standards -- those standards must be implemented using specific approved code libraries which have gone through an audited security certification process.

In at least one major application that I'm aware of, if you set the system to be "FIPS" compliant, users who have the newest client can't send encrypted data to users who have older versions because even though they can read it just fine because they do support the standard of encryption -- the l

Re:Ha Ha!

[iminplaya (723125)]

Nice red herring there. We need to put those who want authority over us under a different, much more strict set of rules. It's our only way of protecting ourselves from the all too frequent abuses.

Lost sales aren't the issue for brands.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

> The fact that the financial loss they claim is mostly due to fake Rolexes, Channel stuff and the like doesn't help. I mean, how many people who buy a fake Rolex could afford a real one?

That's not the point. The reason the brand owners get their panties in so much of a bunch over the counterfeits isn't because the plebes buying the fakes could actually afford to buy a real one, if they weren't wearing a fake ... it's exactly the opposite. When the flunky working the counter at Blockbuster is wearing a good-as-real Rolex, suddenly the brand isn't worth quite as much, and if you're some hotshot looking to make a statement about exactly how much disposable income you have, maybe you'll go buy something else -- something more difficult to fake, something with more intrinsic value -- instead. That's the real worry for high-end brands. It's not the lost sales, it's the damage to the brand that inevitably occurs when average folks get their grubby little McDonalds-covered paws on them.

Which really just makes those "counterfeits kill" ads all the more ironic; the people those ads are being marketed to are essentially the high-end marketer's enemy. They're the ones who must be denied access to the high-end brands; who must be made to covet without actually being able to possess.

Re:Lost sales aren't the issue for brands.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

Oh I agree. But the political pressure -- and I think money as well -- behind the counterfeit-interdiction efforts (at least in the U.S.) is coming from high-end brands. They're using the drugs as a ruse to get attention, but then insisting that inspectors waste time looking for faux Rolexes and handbags.

Fake drugs, aircraft and machine parts, and to a lesser extent IT infrastructure components, are all serious issues. I didn't mean to understate the seriousness of any of them. But there is a huge difference between a counterfeit drug that's actually poison, and a counterfeit handbag that's made without the permission of the trademark-holder. The first represents a clear and obvious danger; the latter is a vague intellectual-property crime at worst. I'm very concerned that enforcement efforts spurred by the former are actually being used for the latter.

Re:Well that's a change

[jorghis (1000092)]

The counterfeit thing is nonsense. The chinese could just as easily modify a non-counterfeit router as a counterfeit one.

The counterfeit hardware isnt really counterfeit, instances like this are usually just the guy who runs the factory keeping it open an hour later than he is telling Cisco and producing a bunch of extra routers that he can sell on the cheap. The counterfeit item itself is typically exactly the same when we are talking about electronics. Its not like they are using completely different designs and slapping the Cisco brand name on it. (I am sure there are exceptions to this that someone will point out but I am speaking in general terms here, this rule applies for most counterfeit electronics)

Sure, we should be concerned because American companies are having their IP that they put a big investment into stolen, but its no less secure to buy a counterfeit router than a non-counterfeit.

Re:Well that's a change

[rbanzai (596355)]

I think you have not heard of counterfeit brake-pads. Counterfeits are a significant danger when they move beyond the more visible realm of watches and bags. I would not be surprised if at least 50% of all manufactured items are subject to counterfeiting and it goes all the way down to mundane but important things like o-rings, cotter pins, bolts, cables, etc.

The problem remains the same whether it is a simple or sophisticated item: something has been compromised. But what exactly? Finish, fit, function? Do you want to gamble your life on it? Your property? Your data?

I don't care about watches and bag. The rest has me concerned.

Re:

[Trigun (685027)]

IIRC, the gear was not counterfeit, but merely not licensed by Cisco. The same factories made X units, Cisco bought X units, everything else made it to the black market, and was considered counterfeit, due to the fake Cisco packaging, etc.

Re:

[kcelery (410487)]

Please keep any eye on the Xerox repairman as well as the router guy.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/199909/msg00020.html [interesting-people.org]

Re:

[TheVelvetFlamebait (986083)]

Yeah? And I think you're a CHINESE SPY!
 
;)

Re:Someone had to say it

[MrNaz (730548)]

How are you on the internet then? I'd wager a bet that > 50% of the products you use on a daily basis are at least partly made in China.

But back up a minute, since when was China the sworn enemy of the US? If the US didn't trade with countries it viewed with suspicion, then they'd pretty much only be trading with Canada, and even then it'd be a begrudging trade arrangement.

Re:Someone had to say it

[danielsfca2 (696792)]

Oh come on, you've gotta include Israel in that list.

The GP has a perfectly good point though. We didn't trade with the USSR. We still don't trade with Cuba and they're harmless! We are the biggest hypocrites ever for trading with China, who has a human rights and oppression record that Stalin or Castro would admire, and we ignore that it's in China's best interests to destroy us to make oil cheaper for them.

Re:Someone had to say it

[WindBourne (631190)]

A number of countries have MFN with us, even though they are in tier 3. In particular, China was given it because it was though that china had turned over a new leaf. Keep in mind that our economy was going to push democracy there. Nobody in either Poppa Bush or Clinton's admin thought this would be turned against us. In the past, whatever countries we have allowed economically close to use has prospered and generally it has stabilized and pushed them to democracy. The problem is that china is the first communist country (though a few have been dictators) and the only one larger than ourselves. Basically, we have bitten off more than we can chew. To make matters worse, W. is close to bankrupting us, by our trade AND fed deficits. As it is, China is keenly aware that our military is for the first time in almost 150 years, spent. All in all, had we not given China MFN/WTO, not invaded iraq, or had a more responsible president been in place of W (and both of them were better), this would not be happening. We are just in the perfect storm that happens to favor China in all aspects.