FBI Concerned About Implications of Counterfeit Cisco Gear 273
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.
Well that's a change (Score:2)
That's a much better job as scaring us to support the anticounterfeit capains than the previous stuff.
I mean, I've seen those ads saying "counterfeited items can kill" with a teddy bear ready to burn a child alive because he's not fireproof, and I must say it felt a little bit too much.
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
Lost sales aren't the issue for brands. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
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Re:Lost sales aren't the issue for brands. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Well that's a change (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Well that's a change (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The FBI Followed Up With (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The FBI Followed Up With (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nightmare (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to keep a lot of people awake at night.
Re:Nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't trust the hardware, you can't trust anything. Scary stuff.
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Luckily, while there is a theoretical possibility of an attack using that vector, it seems unlikely to me once I consider the difficulty of adding a full speed packet sniffer on a Cisco that doesn't impact performance noticeably and has some way to get data out of a network you don't know. It's not like the government says "I'm buying this router to install in classified network X", rather they buy from a
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Or maybe a back-doored packet forwarding ASIC which ignores all ACLs to filter a particular netblock, like say 203/8 or 202/7, of which large chunks are in China? (or something more specific if you prefer)
As for the parent post, you should be able to tell that your firmware got flashed by loading a different feature set. The trouble is, what if it's the hardware that is subtly subverted, regardless of the firmware, as in my example?
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Who says the real Cisco made in the same factory by the same people isn't just as thoroughly hacked?
Perhaps it's time to INSIST that those jobs come back to the U.S.
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I'll bet if one of the biggest buyers of secure networking equipment hints that it will only be interested in units made entirely in the U.S., they'll find a way to get it ramped up here. After all, China found a way to ramp it up there.
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Re:Nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
I trust neither Cisco nor the FBI.
Re:Nightmare (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nightmare (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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For those who don't trust Wikipedia, Here [uncyclopedia.org] is another cannibal.
"How can a guy with that much money not afford contacts?" ~ Linus Torvalds on Bill Gates' coke bottle glasses
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Re:Nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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At this point the adversary relationship is our choice, and as China becomes more powerful we should consider its functional value rather than our post-Colonial nostalgia for White power in Asia. We have a mutual cultural enemy in Islam, and far more interests in common than otherwise. (Tibet is functionally expendable. It needs us but we don't need Tibet.)
Time to quit h
Re:Nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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I am concerned with this because I care about privacy and anonymity, both vital factors in a free society. If you have not already read the paper 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [ssrn.com] I really recommend you to do that. The increasing attac on privacy and anonymity are sadly making similarities to 1984 [wikipedia.org] more frequent.
Re:Nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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?
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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.
That's probably excessive. You only need a from-scratch compiler to be just powerful enough to compile some version of, say, GCC. That solves the bootstrap problem. Then you need to audit the source for the version(s) of GCC you use, which is non-trivial but surely easier than writing a compiler from scratch.
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How any jesus-loving American think raising taxes is ever a good idea? What are you, one of them durn libruls?
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Maybe Cisco should open a factory in the US and sell a line of super secure routers. You can only buy them from Cisco and they are shipped right from Cisco to the buyer.
Or maybe some other company should do that.
I am just waiting for some group to slip some bot code into all those linksys/netgear home routers. Now that would be a bot net that would be hard to even detect. Who runs malware detection on their router?
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I do think these people should be concerned about their laptops, ipods, and anything else made in China. This is almost like us buying our equipment from Russia during the cold war.
China is a "communist" country with a capitalist economy, a different and scary beast. One that makes the toys we and our government loves to buy. And the question is what have we forgotten how to make because we w
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I think I'm just going to trust those other guys over there that I've never met, but everyone else seems to trust...
Concern? (Score:2)
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http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/199909/msg00020.html [interesting-people.org]
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How is it, concern? Is there any evidence of shadow access to the cloned hardware or not? At the very least it should be rather easy to know if the cloned firmware is an exact copy of the Cisco firmware or not. I can understand the concern of cloned equipment in general, but to speak about a particular case and be so vague means for me that there is in fact no evidence of any type of backdoor.
OK, I give up, how? How do they know the flash chip package doesn't have 2 banks. One that is normally presented as being the whole thing and a shadow copy that is presented when it recieves a particular access sequence?
The only tests they have can tell them it WAS a clean router before the destructive tests.
Really (Score:3, Insightful)
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By the article, Cisco has no direct sales--only gold/silver partners who they claim to train train themselves. However, some of the counterfeit equipment was purchases through gold/silver partners. -- Paul
FUD (Score:2, Interesting)
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;)
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So, what do YOU stand to gain by portraying the feds' concerns about prospective threats to government infrastructure and everything that rides on it as bogus? How does your characterization (implied) that counterfeit routing equipment used to protect systems on which lives depend is just fine, and not a concern, benefit you? You seem to have a vested interest in devaluing the concerns of the people that are asked to protect national interests in this respect - possibly
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Could be that the Chinese stripped out all the CALEA-mandated hooks to make the stuff safe for their markets and now the FBI is having a hissy fit about clean equipment finding its way back onto the US market.
Time for state-sponsored fablabs (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
In order to cut the costs to a bare minimum I recommend we order the robots from China.
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Besides, the issue is not within the design itself. (I know, this point is arguable... but that is a different thread) the issue is non-trustworthy people building unauthorized reproductions of Cisco equipment.
As
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Sorry, not going to happen. I've personally built and troubleshot their competitors (Juniper) equipment and we didn't even have access to the VHDL, Boot Prom, OS, or any other software documentation.
I am sure that there is a price to this. Make it a government policy that every military hardware must come with its full VHDL, schematics and firmware code. I honestly thought it was the case. I guess it is for very sensitive techs like missiles or planes. Maybe all we need to is to learn that network equipment can be very sensitive stuff as well.
What do you think builds them? The only thing hand built is the high level assembly and inspection.
And this is because of this high level assembly that there is a human labor cost that can be a huge part of the overall cost. Because this part is significant,
Uhhh... (Score:3, Funny)
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if you export jobs/manufacturing/industry (Score:2)
Not a good decision (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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For example a conflict with china over Taiwan needs only a boycott from China to the USA and a few undersea data cable severances to wreck the US economy. With manufacturing and back office functionality moved overseas the ability of a large military to protect borders becomes irrelevant when economic vulnerable points lie outside of those borders.
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When I was working w/ a company that made security Holograms for UL, one of our R&D people went to Bejing, where they happily showed him the R&D Hologram lab, where they were trying to duplicate our security Hologram. They also were more than happy to show him samples of a dozen or so other holograms they had already cloned.
From his description, they
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Crap from Walmart is not as critical to the American Way of Live
as many people believe.
Oh No! (Score:3, Funny)
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Really? ebay? (Score:3, Insightful)
To any federal agency monitoring this (NSA), please stop buying your network and computing gear from yard sales and ebay.
In other news... (Score:2)
Closed Systems and Black Boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Nobody ever got fired for buying top brand (Score:2)
Great! let's class everything as a weapon. (Score:2)
We didn't make it, we don't know what it does. It must be a threat.
The wonderful thing about this (apart from the certainty that it will involve giving the security organisations more money) is that you don't have to prove anything. Just say "it's possible" (not even probable), or that they're "concerned" or that there "might be a threat" and suddenly everyone is running around as if the sky is falling.
Time to stop watching the James Bond movies guys. Go bac
Supposed to Be the Other Way Around (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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They've got the money, and the interest in self-defense. Though it really all looks like Orwell's _1984_ with the spyglass turned around: now it's Eurasia's turn to always have been at war with Eastasia.
Quick correction (Score:2, Insightful)
There are tons of other countries that can manufacture our goods. The same cannot be said of US purchasing power.
Don't be upset though, your mistake is common amongst those with only a cursory knowledge of the subject like you have.
Trusting "trust." (Score:2)
Then, you have to look at ever line of every tool source as well as all the source of everything. Even then, you need to verify hardware, BIOS, etc.
It is a hard job. Maybe impossible.
The first step, however, is to STOP buying aggregate d
Don't forget Huawei (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Interesting contradiction (Score:2)
Government should mandate American-made (Score:3, Insightful)
How hard will be for Cisco and us GOV to make cust (Score:2)
I retired a few routers... (Score:3, Informative)
And was shocked to find that, for example, my 3745 had, among other things, 4 VWIC-2MFT-T1 interfaces... Three of the four were counterfeit--but all were bought through Cisco Gold partners.
Until I saw this with my own eyes, I had no idea how wide this issue reached.
They should have known it all along. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They should have known it all along. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:They should have known it all along. (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Re:That's not good enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have a silly walk as well?
Validating pre-built products (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true. The new FIPS regulations change that. (Score:3, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Whenever possible (and I do check), I do not buy Chinese made products. I pay more to avoid or do without.
Re:Someone had to say it (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)