Well, that depends on your definition of tampering, but if you want to exclude manufacturing something that is not what was specced then I am fine with that but please do supply a new term.
I would definitely spot that device if it were on these boards because it was described in detail and there were some pictures of what it supposedly looked like.
A device like that is not on either side of the board and it isn't in between the outer board layers (where it would be much harder to spot, especially if the cavity would be covered by a ground plane on one side).
I am not saying it is impossible, it is just very hard to hide something like that once you know it is there. The only candidate spots left that I can not check without destruction is underneath some of the devices or inside some of the devices. That would be a different level of sophistication than the original article alluded to.
> I would definitely spot that device if it were on these boards because it was described in detail and there were some pictures of what it supposedly looked like.
In case you missed it, there is an article posted today [0] that has this quote from "Hardware security expert Joe Fitzpatrick", one of the Bloomberg sources, regarding "the supposed spy chip":
> In September when he asked me like, “Okay, hey, we think it looks like a signal amplifier or a coupler. What’s a coupler? What does it look like?” […] I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story.
Oh, that's interesting. So they basically took one guys hypothetical and turned that into a news item positively seeded with images of the hypothetical, rather than an actual device.
The original article has now dropped into the real of SF for me until they show a detailed shot of an actual board with a parasitic device on it. Until then this is a wild goose chase.
