India gets paranoid about foreign tech

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/22/india_homegrown_chips_broadband_vendors/

India’s national security paranoia reached new levels this week as reports emerged that all foreign vendors have been banned from supplying networking kit for its national broadband project, while the government wants to produce its own chips for use in sensitive installations.
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The government is planning the country’s first chip-making facilities at an estimated cost of Rs.25,000 crore (£2.9bn) because it’s worried about the risk of potential security vulnerabilities in imported chips.

JimmyCrackCorn

Security holes in first gen slapped together products on the way.


Do they plan to develop all the logic chips themselves?

syklops

Designing their own chips and writing their own software opens them up to security vulnerabilities via software bugs. The west or the further east won't need to back door their stuff, just hack it after completion.

And the computers they are building this new tech with is all built in-house as well Im guessing?

D'Agger

How are they not seeing the risks involved is beyond me, should be interesting!

Capt'n Midnight

to be weighed against the risks of Chinese / Israeli / US / EU kit dialling home when they spot interesting packets

base it on BSD / reverse engineer older well understood kit - there are ways of reducing the risk. Yes you loose performance but older circuits will run faster with each generation of silicon.

And whatever you say about call centres, real engineers are cheap in India

noclee

All network vendors have r&d hubs in india so it would be easy enough to achieve. But most net vendors use of the shelf silicon for there enterprise port folio and in house silicon for some for there more expensive isp kit with r&d for this done in there country of origin.