A widely reported Chinese backdoor in military chips appears to have little to do with the Chinese, but the backdoor in the FPGA chip is real, probably part of the manufacturer's debugging hardware, and is unlikely to be easily disabled.

Over the weekend, there were numerous reports that proof of a backdoor in a chip "used by the military" had been found. The reports stemmed from a University of Cambridge researcher's web page which claimed that, in the course of research, an "American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard" was scanned and a "previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer" was found. It went on to say that, once a key had been extracted from the chip, that key could be used to disable or reprogram the chip even if locked, and suggested that, given the prevalence of the chip in question in everything from weapons to public transport, it could "be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon". Read more...