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China Hardware

China Bars Purchases of Micron Chips, Escalating US Conflict (msn.com) 175

Posted by EditorDavid from the trade-wars dept.
"China delivered the latest salvo in an escalating semiconductor war with the U.S.," reports Bloomberg, "announcing that Micron Technology Inc. products have failed to pass a cybersecurity review in the country." In a statement Sunday, Beijing warned operators of key infrastructure against buying the company's goods, saying it found "relatively serious" cybersecurity risks in Micron products sold in the country. The components caused "significant security risks to our critical information infrastructure supply chain," which would affect national security, according to the statement from the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC...

Chinese officials privately say that the probe of Micron is part of a broader trend toward the dominance of "pro-retaliation" voices in Beijing, where national security concerns increasingly trump economic arguments. "No one should understand this decision by CAC as anything but retaliation for the US's export controls on semiconductors," said Holden Triplett, founder of Trenchcoat Advisors and a former FBI counterintelligence official in Beijing. "No foreign business operating in China should be deceived by this subterfuge. These are political actions pure and simple, and any business could be the next one to be made an example of." The move brings fresh uncertainty to the other US chipmakers that sell to China, the world's biggest market for semiconductors.
The article notes pointedly that memory chips "aren't usually considered a cybersecurity risk because they don't require any specific software or run code. They're mostly basic grids of transistors used for storing data and, as such, haven't typically been a vector of attack for hackers." The Associated Press describes China's move as "stepping up a feud with Washington over technology and security," adding that Chinese officials "appear to be struggling to find ways to retaliate without hurting China's smartphone producers and other industries and efforts to develop its own processor chip suppliers," which import more than $300 billion in foreign chips every year. An official review of Micron under China's increasingly stringent information security laws was announced April 4, hours after Japan joined Washington in imposing restrictions on Chinese access to technology to make processor chips on security grounds. Foreign companies have been rattled by police raids on two consulting firms, Bain & Co. and Capvision, and a due diligence firm, Mintz Group. Chinese authorities have declined to explain the raids but said foreign companies are obliged to obey the law.
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China Bars Purchases of Micron Chips, Escalating US Conflict More

China Bars Purchases of Micron Chips, Escalating US Conflict

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  • Business With China (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @03:55PM (#63540273)

    The sooner the world stops doing business with China, the better. I would LOVE to see China retaliate by banning the import of ALL foreign goods and services. Maybe the world would finally learn its lesson.

    • Re:Business With China (Score:4, Informative)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @04:22PM (#63540361)

      The sooner the world stops doing business with China, the better. I would LOVE to see China retaliate by banning the import of ALL foreign goods and services. Maybe the world would finally learn its lesson.

      According to a quick Google search, about 75-80% of all goods sold at Walmart are imported from China and Walmart has the largest share of US retail sales at 6.3%, followed by Amazon and is the leading retailer worldwide by revenue [statista.com], also followed by Amazon.

      • Re:Business With China (Score:5, Interesting)

        by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @06:03PM (#63540567)

        According to a quick Google search...

        And the ONLY reason for that is the prices match the Chinese-like wages being paid to the workers in the Free world. Eliminating China (and not allowing a similar successor) would require wages to increase accordingly. China's advantages are that they can treat their workers like crap (due to overpopulation), and they completely avoid environmental and related costs of production (among other things) by which other countries must abide.

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by dynamo ( 6127 )

          So you are implying that workers never get treated like crap, and factories never have environmental problems in the U.S? Both things are catastrophic, nation-threatening problems here - the worker one at least being clearly potentially worse, since we have no healthcare system for people who aren't rich.

          • Re:Business With China (Score:4)

            by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @07:22PM (#63540679)

            So you are implying that workers never get treated like crap....

            -sigh-

            • So you are implying that workers never get treated like crap....

              -sigh-

              I know, right? Can't even have a simple conversation anymore with this idiocy.

          • Re: Business With China (Score:5, Informative)

            by Junta ( 36770 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @07:37PM (#63540699)

            We are grading on a curve here.

            In the US, we don't see:
            -Workers expected to live at the work building for the entire workweek at the best of times. Only able to see their family in the weekend, sometimes.
            -When COVID detected at a workplace, the works becoming a detention center keeping the workers at work and forbidding them from going home. If course they were allowed to keep working if they were well enough, but not see family until the infection passed. I think this is no longer happening, but that it did happen soaks to their general strategy.
            -Forced labor from blatantly ethnic camps feeding into the private sector.

            There are others all over the place, and the US may be worse than some Western Europeans in this regard, however China does things that even the US left behind about a century ago. We can point out all sorts of BS in the US, but at least some China laborers have it worse.

            • Reminds me of the factory that made cards:

              https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]

          • You don't see suicide nets at factories in the United States.

        • That's a bit dated. China's wages are going up, so much so that Chinese manufacturers are moving production overseas. Some of them are abandoning China entirely given the recent trade spat between China and the United States/the rest of the Free World(tm).

        • I understand some of the manufacturing is moving out of China to Vietnam and other places because the wages in China have increased alot over the years.

          So it may just be a bit of time that instead of one "factory to the world" we will have many "factories to the world" with each concentrating on different sectors.

      • Re:Business With China (Score:4, Funny)

        by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @06:07PM (#63540585)
        Carting Walmart products home, shifting them into the garage after a few months, letting them ferment 5 or 6 years, then moving them into a storage unit or another 35, and then finally having your children cart it all to the landfill when you shift off this mortal coil is the Budget American Dream! Human produce 3 things: Sewage, garbage, and offspring.

    • And your plan to deal with the unemployed masses and ensuing economic collapse is? how many lives is your plan worth?

    • yup, world would certainly learn very fast that everyones standards of living are far too high. I think it could almost instigate a revolution when everyone from middle class down becomes massively poorer from that.

    • Seems good in theory. China is an anti-democratic nation that is quickly gaining influence in the world. But in terms of geopolitics, it is a huge mistake to cut off trade with other nations. Backing any nation into a corner historically leads to conflict.

    • The sooner the world stops doing business with China, the better.

      The shareholders of the vast American corporation I work for would be very annoyed if that happened, due to the $ billion or so in profits they get from China every year.
      You're blaming the wrong people.

  • ... it hurt itself in confusion!

  • DRAM != Memory Products (Score:5, Interesting)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @04:13PM (#63540339)

    From TFS:

    "[Memory Chips] aren't usually considered a cybersecurity risk because they don't require any specific software or run code. They're mostly basic grids of transistors used for storing data and, as such, haven't typically been a vector of attack for hackers."

    Trouble is, Micron not only sell Memory Chips, but also memory products. Those are Flash Drives, Flash DIMMs, and (in the future) CLX modules. And all three of those have microcontrollers, that run software and, among other things, handle the native encription of said devices.

    Conceptually, Micron could weaken the encription of their devices at the behest of the 3 letter agencies of their home countries.

    Having said that, I believe that Micron is a much threat to cybersecurity as Huawei and ZTE are threats to cyeber security. Or, to put it in other words, China is using the same excuse to punish ONE USoA company that the USoA has used to punish MANY chinese companies (Huawei, ZTE, YMTC, SMIC, Tik-Tok, etc).

    PS: I live in Venezuela, I'll happily use Huawei, ZTE, CISCO, Micron et al. I have no particular beef in the USoA vs. China in either direction.

    • Also, RAM can be vector of attack, when used by government actors. For example, memory chip can detect I wrote some specific sequence of values and dump me entire RAM to some region accessible by me.

      • Also, RAM can be vector of attack, when used by government actors. For example, memory chip can detect I wrote some specific sequence of values and dump me entire RAM to some region accessible by me.

        Fucking nonsense.

        It's time to brush up the knowledge on what page tables are.
        If you aren't accessing RAM through a page table, then you already have access to all of RAM.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )
          Sure the RAM chips don't know what's in the MMU's head - but there absolutely are side-channel attacks that _are_ caused by memory chip design. And they can be very subtle (though, decapping and analyzing the chip would eventually find them). Modulating power consumption to leak information, for instance. Knowing _what_ to leak based on signatures you see in the memory matrix would be very version-specific, but it could be done. Of course, Micron has not done any of this - but anyway, security attack surfac

          • Re:DRAM != Memory Products (Score:5, Informative)

            by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @09:25PM (#63540917)
            Side channels can indeed happen, but only from userspace software that as a matter of course has analyzed the side channel through the TLB


            RAM chips don't just not know what's in the MMU's head- they don't even know their own fucking address with respect to the physical address space of the CPU, much less the virtual address space of any process- and that blindness goes both directions.

            Don't try to church some reality into this nonsense.

            Note, I'm not for a second saying that you can't exploit hardware problems in RAM chips. RowHammer and the very clever ways it's been used are great examples. But still, that veil has never been pierced, and it relies on blasting garbage across RAM until the system reboots, or you get lucky and hit a PTE.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by larwe ( 858929 )
              You could have thought a bit before replying. It is entirely plausible that attacks exist _within a page_. Page size is finite and the absolute address is irrelevant for an attack that goes like this: "Hmm, this 4K area (or 2MB area) just got written with the signature of an interesting traffic header - I shall leak the rest of this information in that page via my side channel". Or "I shall write that page to a small hidden flash area on my die so Agents 86 and 99 with the right tool can come retrieve it la

              • You could have thought a bit before replying.

                Na, I'm pretty sure I'm good. Let's see, though.

                Page size is finite and the absolute address is irrelevant for an attack that goes like this: "Hmm, this 4K area (or 2MB area) just got written with the signature of an interesting traffic header - I shall leak the rest of this information in that page via my side channel".

                This would be a fascinating development, indeed.
                So, our 4K CPU page is filled- let's say with the buf of an skb- right off the wire.

                Which DRAM does your signature end up in?
                Do these DRAMs also have magical side channels to talk to each other?
                Let's say all DRAMs *can* magically talk to each other and re-assemble said signature, and then dump a 4K page to some side channel... A confusing concept for them, of course, since DRAMs don't have page tables, and t

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              RAM can be vulnerable to things like Rowhammer attacks, or it can be designed to resist them. I wouldn't be surprised if similar issues exist for flash memory.

              • Undoubtedly.
                Not sure where you're going with those assertions, but the current discussion is about

                Also, RAM can be vector of attack, when used by government actors. For example, memory chip can detect I wrote some specific sequence of values and dump me entire RAM to some region accessible by me.

                being nonsensical due to how logical RAM access gets turned into physical alterations of address and data lines on a group of DRAMs.

    • It's a REASON, not an "excuse." I guess we see where your bias leans.

    • Having said that, I believe that Micron is a much threat to cybersecurity as Huawei and ZTE are threats to cyeber security.

      Really? You’d put black box networking equipment that routinely deals with data from massive sums of people and is, by its nature, Internet-connected and thus would have a far easier time exhilarating data, hijacking connections, or reporting on who is talking to whom on par with memory?

      I agree that both can be used for nefarious purposes, and I certainly don’t blame China for playing the game by engaging in some tit-for-tat, but the threat posed by the former is far greater.

    • Shouldn't they be banning all CPUs/GPUs manufactured outside China as well? Intel, AMD, Nvidia, all the various ARM variations made by TSMC, Samsung, etc outside China?

      After all those chips are for sure having logic built in, unlike general RAM / memory which does not really have much in the way of logic circuits, if at all any.

      That would make more sense, compared to banning Micron. Of course that will also kill alot of China's progress as well.

      Would be interesting to watch, at the least.

  • The real problem with security is that Micron had some. This can't happen fast enough, the US needs to reduce it's dependence on outside resources. It is plenty big to do this, if not for the greedy corporations and regulating itself out of competition.

  • Yeah, mmmm hmm, this is China. Yeah, um, you're black. The answer to the question "Can this be any more black?" is none. None more black.

  • The US' has always implied it'd defend Taiwan against attack (well, until Biden actually said it more or less on the record). But the hotter this trade war gets, the more it is certain the US would *have* to respond militarily to any attempt by China to conquer Taiwan.

  • That is the question. Very interesting youtube with both sides discussing whether to engage or contain China. Kishore Mahbubani gives China's perspective on things, arguing that we can and should work with China, it is now a bipolar world whether you like it or not. John Mearsheimer sticking with his theory on great power politics, e.g. like it or not conflict is just the way things will go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • You can only "engage" with a nation that assiduously adheres to its agreements with other nations, and adheres to the framework of international organizations that it chooses to be a party to (WTO/UN).

  • Seriously? (Score:3)

    by cloud.pt ( 3412475 ) on Sunday May 21, 2023 @08:02PM (#63540749)

    Quote: The article notes pointedly that memory chips "aren't usually considered a cybersecurity risk because they don't require any specific software or run code. They're mostly basic grids of transistors used for storing data and, as such, haven't typically been a vector of attack for hackers."

    So much to unpack here... First, as others have pointed out, this is not just the memory chips but memory PRODUCTS. Micron makes RAM and NAND chips but they also make controllers, memory sticks and SSDs. The ban is on PRODUCTS.

    Second and most importantly: "memory chips aren't usually considered a cybersecurity risk" wait WHAT!? Yeah most memory issues may not originate in chip or RAM flaws, but most security flaws are usually related to memory. Be it memory access (e.g. to get keys/passwords), memory replacement (e.g. to perform arbitrary execution of code, usually by escalating its privilege when replacing existing privileged code), and even the simple act of knowing partial memory data can induce in predictions that can be used for the above.

    • but most security flaws are usually related to memory.

      They're related to memory, in the sense that all data is accessed through memory, but security flaws are originating usually from software code, not memory chips. If China want's to protect itself from computer exploits, they need to regulate the code or Intel/AMD based CPUs. Banning US manufactured memory chips is not going to accomplish that.

  • Memory chips contain control logic now, they are not just a dumb transistor grid, and Micron also sells things like SSD that are mini-systems with a CPU that can run code. I guess it would be possible to have a memory controller detect a known sequence of bytes and modify it in-memory to introduce an exploit.

    And as for RAM not being an attack vector, rowhammer was quite a big deal a few years ago.

    It doesn't mean it is not bullshit for the trade war, but it is plausible bullshit.

  • When getting a PCB manufactured, Iâ(TM)ve noticed that there are a lot of chips that have Chinese clones. If you manufacture in China, the original chips are not in stock. But the clones are. Obviously most everyone just substitutes the Chinese chip. But this is obviously disingenuous to benefit the Chinese manufacturer

  • I mean the USA didn't either when they made their decision but that's not the point. China are going after Micron here, how dare they do this so unilaterally and unprovoked!

    Honestly jokes aside I don't know what anyone thought was going to happen here. China has a long history of tit-for-tatting when it comes to sanctions, tariffs, trade barriers, and even just diplomats engaging in the usual multinational smack-talk.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Micron sued Chinese DRAM maker JHICC claiming it had "stolen" their IP. The US put sanctions on JHICC so they could not get any US manufacturing equipment or equipment support. That "stolen" "Micron" IP was provided by former Taiwanese workers in Taiwanese DRAM companies which Micron acquired and fired. After they were fired they went to work for Taiwanese UMC who was subcontracted by JHICC to develop their DRAM process. i.e. Micron basically bought Taiwanese DRAM makers to close them down.

    Now the US put sa

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