On November 8th, 2011, Dawn Lim wrote for Wired how the US Missile Defense Agency has received phony electronic parts seven times in the past five years. Lieutenant General Patrick O'Reilly, director of the agency, told Congress that the phony chips might have caused a loss of life had they been deployed in active combat situations (they were not). Gen. O'Reilly went on to say that “We do not want a $12 million missile to be destroyed by a $2 part.” The US military has increasingly dealt with counterfeit goods that have made their way into defense contractor's vulnerable supply chains. These counterfeit goods are integrated into US military systems, ultimately compromising those systems.
The Pentagon is worried that bogus chips could alter ballistic missile protection systems, or worse, allow for a foreign country to control US systems through "trojan horse" circuits. Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin said that "There's a lot of counterfeiting going on. It’s a clear and present danger. It is a threat to our troops and we are not going to let it go on.” The article notes that these phony chips have also shown up in aircraft, including Lockheed Martin’s C-130J transport plane and Boeing's P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft.
Of course, many of these phony electronic parts are coming from China. Sen. Levin pushed for greater contractor supervision of their supply chains, saying that “We are going to act. We cannot rely on the Chinese to act. That has been proven for a long period of time.”
The source article can be found here.
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Consider these counterfeit chips in light of this wonderfully written blog entry about a proposed secure chip development process.
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