China suspects Intel chips of espionage and creating national security threats

Products sold in China by the American company Intel must be checked for threats to national security, the Cyber ​​Security Association of China (CSAC) said. The statement notes that the chipmaker “constantly causes damage” to the national security and interests of the country.

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Although CSAC is an industry group and not a government body, it has close ties to the Chinese authorities. Therefore, the long list of accusations against Intel, published this week on the official CSAC account on the WeChat social network, may become a reason for a serious audit by the industry regulator represented by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Official representatives of Intel and CAC have so far refrained from commenting on this issue.

«It is recommended to initiate a review of the network security of products sold by Intel in China to effectively protect China’s national security and the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese consumers,” the CSAC statement said.

The CSAC statement alleges that Intel processors, including Xeon chips used for artificial intelligence tasks, have a number of vulnerabilities. The organization considered this to be a serious problem in terms of product quality and safety control, which indicates an “extremely irresponsible attitude towards customers” on the part of Intel.

It is also alleged that Intel’s related software is vulnerable to US National Security Agency backdoors. “This poses a serious threat to the security of critical information infrastructure in countries around the world, including China. Use of Intel products poses a serious risk to national security,” the CSAC statement said.

Even a temporary ban on Intel products could further limit the supply of chips for the artificial intelligence segment in the Chinese market, whose participants are making a lot of effort to find viable alternatives to products from Nvidia, whose advanced AI solutions have been banned from being supplied to China by US authorities. According to the source, this year Intel received several contracts to supply Xeon chips to a number of government organizations in the Middle Kingdom.

Let us recall that last year the CAC prohibited domestic key infrastructure operators from buying products from the American chipmaker Micron Technology Inc. This decision was made against the backdrop of the fact that the company’s products did not pass a cybersecurity test. A similar check of Intel products could negatively affect the company’s revenues, more than a quarter of which at the end of last year were received in the Middle Kingdom.