China Criticizes US For Making Weapon Plans Steal-able, Alleges Attacks From US

Etherwalk writes "Huang Chengqing, China's top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. 'We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it's not helpful in solving the problem.' Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. 'They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.' In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: 'Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'" A few experts think China's more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations.

Re:Outsourced R&D

[dj245]

Can you be more specific? I thought designs and schematics would detail all of these things to make sure someone else knows what to do. It's a bad idea to let critical information get stuck in the heads of your scientists and engineers in case they, you know, die.

Here's one.

My company sells gas turbines for generating electricity. These are based on a standard design which is analyzed to death and then built full-scale to make sure it performs. There is one main package (the gas turbine) and then small little modules which resemble small shipping containers (10x10ft, 15x20ft, etc) with equipment inside. The piping and electricals is run between the packages and the little modules.

Even if you had all the blueprints and design documents, you could easilly fall into the trap of thinking that "modular" implies a similarity to LEGOs and you can lay out the modules wherever you want, changing the placement to suit the site conditions. Maybe you want to move Module X from the left side of the machine to the right side of the machine, or move Module Y by 20 feet in order to try to hide a noisy piece of equipment from a residential area.

On the surface, this sounds quite easy! Just make sure your pipefitters have a little extra pipe, and the electricians have a little extra wiring so they can connect it up. The problem is that the system is completely and tightly integrated-

The piping has been analyzed in the standard design for friction losses and thermal stress. Move the module without considering this, and maybe the system doesn't get quite the pressure it was expecting. Maybe the pipes crack because of thermal expansion.

The Hazardous area classification [wikipedia.org] has been studied in the standard design. Pressurized, airtight, explosion-proof electrical junction boxes are expensive, so they don't get used if they aren't needed. You use a regular one instead. Not a problem at all if you aren't in a hazardous area. Move that module 20 feet, however, and maybe you have put it in a dangerous location.

The entire layout has been planned for maintenance and construction. There is enough room to take everything apart and put it back together again. If you move a module to the wrong spot, maybe you can't remove Part Y from the machine. Or maybe you don't have enough room to put a wrench on equipment Z, so you can't install it in the first place.

The electricals have been designed as an integrated system too, and optimized to use the smallest wire possible while still being reliable and safe. If you make the length longer, however, maybe the resistance loss is high enough that the signal is unreliable.

As the GP said, if you are stealing plans for complicated equipment, you basically have to get to know the design as well as the original designer. If you don't, it is very easy to make a small change for reasons of improvement or localization which completely breaks the design. This can happen even if you have every drawing and document ever made for the thing. Inevitably you will have to change something, especially if you are stealing from the US since we use imperial measurements. It can be as simple as using 26mm thick steel plate instead of 1 inch thick steel plate.