WHILE the Pentagon and allies of the US worry that rogue states might insert sophisticated “kill switches” inside critical microchips, the military’s computer hardware continues to be vulnerable to a far more mundane form of attack: dubious chips.
A UK-based electronics firm has revealed that a classified avionics system it made for a military aircraft failed when installed in a test plane. It turned out, says a company source, that many of the connecting pads on a key microchip had not been connected to the metal legs of the chip carrier – the plastic package that houses and protects the…
