The Pentagon no longer trusts its chips.
Because the US microchip industry has shifted in recent years from manufacturing to mainly designing chips, the Department of Defense is increasingly having to buy its microchips from makers abroad, particularly in east Asia. Now the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board fears that if such microchips are incorporated into advanced weapons systems, such as GPS-guided smart bombs, adversaries might be able to tamper with the chips’ electronics in the factory to disrupt US military systems at critical times.
They could do this, the board fears, by installing “back-door” vulnerabilities such as hard-wired computer viruses,…
