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Semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan can remotely disable their chip-making machines in the event of a Chinese invasion. (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Probably wiping process control code from the systems that contain tons of fiddly hard to find constants and other information.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    i wonder if this also includes trying to physically damage the machinery in order to ensure one hell of a time getting it back online, because theoretically once you wipe it, you can just start smashing shit together that shouldn't be smashed together lol.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What would be better is polluting the software with invalid but still plausible constraints, so the chips would seem OK and might work for days or weeks but would fail in the field... especially if these chips are used in weapon systems or critical infrastructure.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    this is, decent. The problem here is that it's almost always easier to reverse engineer a system that's partially constructed, than it is one that's completely deconstructed.

    You would ideally want to delete ALL software, and ALL hardware running that software, that would be MUCH harder to reverse engineer. Or at the very least, significantly more expensive.

    although i imagine building chips to fail is almost an impossible thing. Cpus almost never die, unless you blow them up with too much power lol.

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