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.

Nightmare

[chrome]

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.

They should have known it all along.

[gnutoo]

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

Really

[TheRealMindChild]

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

Re:Nightmare

[Arccot]

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.

Time for state-sponsored fablabs

[Yvanhoe]

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.

Lost sales aren't the issue for brands.

[Kadin2048]

> 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:Nightmare

[sm62704]

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

[jdunn14]

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:Nightmare

[demachina]

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.

Not a good decision

[hyades1]

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.

Really? ebay?

[esocid]

...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.

Re:Nightmare

[sconeu]

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

Closed Systems and Black Boxes

[hackus]

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

Re:Nightmare

[chrome]

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:Ha Ha!

[iminplaya]

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.

Supposed to Be the Other Way Around

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:The FBI Followed Up With

[TheRaven64]

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:They should have known it all along.

[sjames]

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.

That's not good enough.

[gnutoo]

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:Well that's a change

[jorghis]

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:Nightmare

[samkass]

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:Someone had to say it

[InsaneProcessor]

This just goes to show that we go screwed with open trade relations with communist China. DO NOT TRADE WITH YOUR SWORN ENEMY!

Whenever possible (and I do check), I do not buy Chinese made products. I pay more to avoid or do without.

Government should mandate American-made

[ktappe]

Equipment that will handle sensitive data should be purchased by the Government only from manufacturers who make it within our borders. Yes, this would increase costs. But it would help ensure that no "special" Chinese chips get inserted into the devices. It would also bring a few manufacturing jobs back to our shores. Of course, I'm assuming here that the very last of our electronics manufacturing infrastructure has not been dismantled...

Quick correction

[hassanchop]

Now China is dependent on US purchasing.

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.

Re:That's not good enough.

[Tsar]

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)]

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.

Re:Well that's a change

[sleigher]

Maybe it's high time America starts to look at how its manufacturing gets done. We spent all this time and money to offshore our manufacturing at the expense of American jobs because of our bottom line. Now we are reaching "long term" and it is going to wind up costing us more than if we kept it here at home. Maybe, just maybe, the corporations will start to look at their long term outlook in a different light. Just because you are getting cheap labor today does not necessarily mean you will save money tomorrow.

Re:Nightmare

[Kadin2048]

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?

Re:Nightmare

[couchslug]

"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."

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 hatin' on the "Heathen Chinee". China never invaded the West and forced it to trade in opium, nor did China support any Kuomintang equivalents here. The screwing has been quite one-sided. No wonder they are pissed!

Re:Someone had to say it

[danielsfca2]

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.

Then it's about fucking time...

[Anonymous Coward]

...we started manufacturing this stuff right here at home again. Fuck California and all the fucking tree huggers out there. Michigan right now will happily welcome any new electronics factories that wish to start up there.

Re:Nightmare

[aurispector]

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:They should have known it all along.

[Garridan]

Doesn't matter what the software looks like. If the hardware itself has backdoors, you've lost. The hardware can hide and mask compromised software. Further, it can be made to behave in a way that makes the software insecure. This is especially scary for chips that implement their own crypto. If somebody puts a backdoor into the chip's crypto, you're boned.

Re:Someone had to say it

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:That's not good enough.

[Teufelsmuhle]

I have a feeling a very very small percentage of those 3 million government employees would be qualified to perform such an audit of code, and an even smaller percentage are actually tasked to do so.

Re:Nightmare

[ZorroXXX]

You should be concerned about those yellow dots only if you planning to violate the law.

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.