There Is No Good Way to Stop China From Planting Microchips in American Electronics

Cybersecurity is full of hard problems, but perhaps none so difficult as securing the supply chain for our electronic devices. That's why the report published this week by Bloomberg about Chinese spies secretly planting microchips in American electronics in order to conduct espionage is so deeply unsettling. There is no way to address the threat of foreign governments compromising our hardware that does not require fundamentally and radically rethinking how we manufacture our devices and lead to more expensive, less ubiquitous electronics at exactly the moment when the internet of things seems to be pushing us in the opposite direction. According to Bloomberg, members of China's People's Liberation Army inserted the compromised microchips during the manufacturing process for motherboards produced by Super Micro Computer Inc., a company based in California. Those compromised motherboards, in turn, found their way to nearly 30 different companies and prompted an ongoing investigation by the U.S. government when the errant microchips were finally discovered by Amazon.