808
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
The US government and the Department of State responded promptly to these
threats by preparing a set of relevant legislative, statutory, and regulatory technical
documents. Moreover, in 2005, the US Department of Justice officially published its
first report on the trial of the delivery of counterfeit goods to military, commercial, and
industrial facilities of the United States and its allies, which was the first document to
confirm officially the danger of “unauthorized introduction of additional elements in
the design of integrated circuits.” In fact, this publication triggered an avalanche-like
process of organizing multiple studies dedicated to this issue by military officials
and scientists from academic institutes or technical universities. DARPA assumed
the leading role in this process. At the initiative of this agency, a number of technical
regulatory documents of the US Department of Defense were prepared, which were
aimed at ensuring the safety of foreign microcircuit supply channels. Effectiveness
of these documents is indirectly proven by the fact that at the moment of publication
of this book there is no documentary evidence of any confirmed fact of introduction
of microcircuits infected with hardware Trojans in the US military systems.
8.8 Safety Control Technologies in Microelectronics
As noted above, the development of safety control technologies in microelectronics
was first stimulated by a very significant fact: in the beginning of the twenty-first
century, state-of-the-art production facilities were transferred to Asia in order to
ensure general competitiveness in the international semiconductor market. As a
result, the Pentagon found itself in a situation where it is possible to manufacture socalled trusted chips for the latest electronic circuits that control missile guidance and
interception systems in America only on the basis of clearly obsolete technologies.
Back in 2004, the US National Security Agency (NSA) agreed with IBM to
launch a joint (initially secret) project called Trusted Foundry Access. According
to the expert estimate, this program of producing exclusively American chips for
the needs of the US Ministry of Defence in 2004–2010 cost 600 million dollars; in
the years after, about a dozen companies of the US industrial and military complex
(including, among others, BAE, Intersil, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Sarnoff,
Teledyne) joined it.
Everyone understood completely that this single Trusted Foundry project was
not a solution to the global problem, but rather a temporary band-aid measure. First
of all, this ensures relative control over only one critical aspect—microelectronic
production itself . Second, which is much more important, control over the existing
semiconductor production shops is the problem of transferring modern technologies
abroad. IBM, for example, keeps actively moving its production facilities to ASIA.
According to the experts, IBM and other flagships of the American semiconductor
industry will soon turn into nothing but fabless corporations, i.e., will only focus on
developments and have no production facilities of their own.
Due to such realities, one of the first programs in this direction called Trust in
ICs was launched at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
The US government and the Department of State responded promptly to these
threats by preparing a set of relevant legislative, statutory, and regulatory technical
documents. Moreover, in 2005, the US Department of Justice officially published its
first report on the trial of the delivery of counterfeit goods to military, commercial, and
industrial facilities of the United States and its allies, which was the first document to
confirm officially the danger of “unauthorized introduction of additional elements in
the design of integrated circuits.” In fact, this publication triggered an avalanche-like
process of organizing multiple studies dedicated to this issue by military officials
and scientists from academic institutes or technical universities. DARPA assumed
the leading role in this process. At the initiative of this agency, a number of technical
regulatory documents of the US Department of Defense were prepared, which were
aimed at ensuring the safety of foreign microcircuit supply channels. Effectiveness
of these documents is indirectly proven by the fact that at the moment of publication
of this book there is no documentary evidence of any confirmed fact of introduction
of microcircuits infected with hardware Trojans in the US military systems.
8.8 Safety Control Technologies in Microelectronics
As noted above, the development of safety control technologies in microelectronics
was first stimulated by a very significant fact: in the beginning of the twenty-first
century, state-of-the-art production facilities were transferred to Asia in order to
ensure general competitiveness in the international semiconductor market. As a
result, the Pentagon found itself in a situation where it is possible to manufacture socalled trusted chips for the latest electronic circuits that control missile guidance and
interception systems in America only on the basis of clearly obsolete technologies.
Back in 2004, the US National Security Agency (NSA) agreed with IBM to
launch a joint (initially secret) project called Trusted Foundry Access. According
to the expert estimate, this program of producing exclusively American chips for
the needs of the US Ministry of Defence in 2004–2010 cost 600 million dollars; in
the years after, about a dozen companies of the US industrial and military complex
(including, among others, BAE, Intersil, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Sarnoff,
Teledyne) joined it.
Everyone understood completely that this single Trusted Foundry project was
not a solution to the global problem, but rather a temporary band-aid measure. First
of all, this ensures relative control over only one critical aspect—microelectronic
production itself . Second, which is much more important, control over the existing
semiconductor production shops is the problem of transferring modern technologies
abroad. IBM, for example, keeps actively moving its production facilities to ASIA.
According to the experts, IBM and other flagships of the American semiconductor
industry will soon turn into nothing but fabless corporations, i.e., will only focus on
developments and have no production facilities of their own.
Due to such realities, one of the first programs in this direction called Trust in
ICs was launched at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the