It turns out that the backdoor found in Chinese-made US military chips by Cambridge researchers might not be evidence of a planned cyberattack. The backdoor is probably there, all right, say other researchers, but that’s because backdoors are built into many field-programmable chips for debugging purposes. Once installed, they can’t be easily removed. Instead, manufacturers try to lock the backdoor with encryption keys that only the manufacturer knows.
That, of course, looks like a manufacturer’s backdoor because, well, that”s what it is. So, really, there are already backdoors in millions of chips being used by critical infrastructures, military systems, and personal devices. But they’re not Chinese government backdoors.
Apparently we’re all supposed to relax now.