The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the newest player in the U.S. Defense Department’s war on counterfeit* parts.
Counterfeit parts, particularly electronics, have posed a huge threat for the Department of Defense for years, threatening the integrity a wide variety of systems, from helicopters to the computers for Missile Defense Agency’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles. Faced with rising costs and rapidly decreasing budgets, U.S. defense contractors have tried to get their hands on cheaper and cheaper parts, sometimes at the expense of authenticity.
A combination of technological developments (e.g., the rise of 3-D printing technology), changes in the computing industry and the markets more generally, and a demand from cash-strapped militaries have helped introduce more and more counterfeit parts into the supply chain.
According to a Senate Armed Services Committee report in May 2012, there were approximately 1,800 cases of suspected counterfeit parts in 2009-10 alone. The total number of individual suspect parts during these two years is at least one million. Interestingly, at least 70 percent of the cases the SASC investigated came from China.
Some cases have yet to be life-threatening to troops. A counterfeit part in the U.S. Navy’s SH-60B helicopter, while not “flight safety critical,” could cause a failure in certain targeting systems. Others, such as the counterfeit ice detection module in the Navy’s P-8A Poseidon, could put pilots’ lives in immediate danger. Even those parts not deemed “safety critical,” were they to fail in the field, could put troops in immediate danger.
DARPA’s Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense (SHIELD), announced on Feb. 24, 2014, “seeks to develop a tool to verify, without disrupting or harming the system, the trustworthiness of a protected electronic component.” This tool, a 100 micron x 100 micron component or “dielet,” is expected to cost “less than a penny per unit,” said DARPA program manager Kerry Bernstein in a statement.
DARPA notes the dielet would be expected to test for common threats. According to the agency’s press release, these include:
Most counterfeit parts, notes the SASC’s report, come from recycled “e-waste” — electronic waste shipped to China by way of the Port of Hong Kong, which is then distributed to noted counterfeit “hubs” such as Shantou and Guangdong Province. Here the parts are dissembled, washed typically in dirty rivers, and stripped of any defining marks, such as the date code or part number.
While methods to detect counterfeit parts do exist (Raytheon provides a good breakdown of some of the methods used here), SHIELD has the upper hand in that it’s non-destructive and cheap, at least ideally. The dielet would be simply inserted into or affixed to an electronic component “without any alteration of the host component’s design or reliability.” Testing could be done with a handheld component or automated, and would only require the dielet itself, a handheld probe, and a smartphone to upload data from the probe to a secure server.
Hopefully, a program such as SHIELD that would make authenticity testing easier, cheaper and faster will help stymie the influx of counterfeit parts into the supply chain, but it’s unlikely to stop them altogether. From materiel to headphones, the counterfeit goods industry is booming in China. The market is aware of this and seeks to adapt accordingly.
“Every year you have better enforcement of laws, but you get more and more professional counterfeiters,” said Doug Clark, a Hong Kong lawyer who specializes in intellectual property issues, in the Financial Times.
In other words, while SHIELD may provide better tools for identifying counterfeits, the U.S. government should be aware that the counterfeiters are ready, willing and able to adapt.
*n.b., “counterfeit” in the Department of Defense’s definition, “as it relates to electronic parts, includes both unauthorized copies and previously used parts that are made to look new, and are sold as new.”
