806
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
If the Communist Party and the Soviet government tasked us with designing
microcircuits containing the above malware back then, it would have been solved
relatively easy from the technical point of view. The purpose of implementing a
Trojan consists in solving a fairly narrow range of tasks (organize a failure of the
unit or a data leakage).
With the collapse of the USSR, harsh struggle for survival began, the special
services in charge of the Ministry of Electronic Industry switched to completely
different problems, and the emerging problem of the Trojans was quickly removed
from our agenda.
Purely professional interest of the authors in the problem of Trojans and other
malware arose only many years later, during their work on the book “Space Electronics”, which was first published in Russia, and then, after the Artech House contacted
the authors, in the USA, Great Britain, and other countries.
The material collected by us back then but not included in that book indicated that such theoretical possibility actually existed. Moreover, thousands of
researchers across the world are actively discussing this problem (hardware Trojans
in microchips), and the United States and one of its divisions, the DARPA agency,
are particularly active in this field. It should be said that we later used a part of these
technical materials in writing Chaps. 5–8 of this book.
We can now say that this was the main reason that pushed the authors toward
studying the problem of Trojans in general and hardware Trojans in microcircuits in
particular.
Going back to the initial question (What did authors of the book know about
Trojans?), the following should be said.
1. Theoretically (and based on the authors’ personal experience), it is possible to
introduce a special device into a microcircuit that would allow unauthorized
(without permission of the legal owner) performance of various functions—
change operation modes, transferring any internal information via side (uncontrolled) channels, change electrical modes of operation of the circuit up to its
destruction (failure) upon external signal from the intruder.
2. The international scientific society for many years has been studying the problems
of hardware Trojans—their possible structure, means of introduction into the
attacked microcircuit, means of masking Trojans in microcircuits, and means
of their activation (how to make them hide until the activation time set by their
owner), as well as methods of their identification in manufactured microcircuits.
3. All these studies are initiated by the US Department of Defense (the main
consumer of secure microcircuits protected from Trojans) and its subdivision,
the DARPA agency, which fund such studies as well as coordinate and organize
various regular international and closed conferences dedicated to this problem.
4. Ironically, the first person to announce in open scientific and technical press
the detection (and detailed documentation of this fact) of a hardware Trojan
embedded in a Chinese microcircuit was Russian; it was Sergey Skorobogatov, a
graduate of one of Moscow universities, who found a job in one of the US universities in the tumultuous 1990s. The microcircuit in which this Russian Sergey
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
If the Communist Party and the Soviet government tasked us with designing
microcircuits containing the above malware back then, it would have been solved
relatively easy from the technical point of view. The purpose of implementing a
Trojan consists in solving a fairly narrow range of tasks (organize a failure of the
unit or a data leakage).
With the collapse of the USSR, harsh struggle for survival began, the special
services in charge of the Ministry of Electronic Industry switched to completely
different problems, and the emerging problem of the Trojans was quickly removed
from our agenda.
Purely professional interest of the authors in the problem of Trojans and other
malware arose only many years later, during their work on the book “Space Electronics”, which was first published in Russia, and then, after the Artech House contacted
the authors, in the USA, Great Britain, and other countries.
The material collected by us back then but not included in that book indicated that such theoretical possibility actually existed. Moreover, thousands of
researchers across the world are actively discussing this problem (hardware Trojans
in microchips), and the United States and one of its divisions, the DARPA agency,
are particularly active in this field. It should be said that we later used a part of these
technical materials in writing Chaps. 5–8 of this book.
We can now say that this was the main reason that pushed the authors toward
studying the problem of Trojans in general and hardware Trojans in microcircuits in
particular.
Going back to the initial question (What did authors of the book know about
Trojans?), the following should be said.
1. Theoretically (and based on the authors’ personal experience), it is possible to
introduce a special device into a microcircuit that would allow unauthorized
(without permission of the legal owner) performance of various functions—
change operation modes, transferring any internal information via side (uncontrolled) channels, change electrical modes of operation of the circuit up to its
destruction (failure) upon external signal from the intruder.
2. The international scientific society for many years has been studying the problems
of hardware Trojans—their possible structure, means of introduction into the
attacked microcircuit, means of masking Trojans in microcircuits, and means
of their activation (how to make them hide until the activation time set by their
owner), as well as methods of their identification in manufactured microcircuits.
3. All these studies are initiated by the US Department of Defense (the main
consumer of secure microcircuits protected from Trojans) and its subdivision,
the DARPA agency, which fund such studies as well as coordinate and organize
various regular international and closed conferences dedicated to this problem.
4. Ironically, the first person to announce in open scientific and technical press
the detection (and detailed documentation of this fact) of a hardware Trojan
embedded in a Chinese microcircuit was Russian; it was Sergey Skorobogatov, a
graduate of one of Moscow universities, who found a job in one of the US universities in the tumultuous 1990s. The microcircuit in which this Russian Sergey