Raptor confirms Talos II not subject to Supermicro chip hack

Bloomberg dropped a bomb earlier today alleging Chinese state actors compromised thousands of Supermicro motherboards by infiltrating the supply chain to insert tiny, almost undetectable chips as exfiltration hardware. The chips, manufactured by the Chinese military, were designed to look like innocuous board components but actually contained memory, networking and sufficient processing power to apparently exploit the machine's BMC at a very low level. The devices could literally do almost anything, and do so in a way that could be nearly undetectable.

It should be said in the interest of journalistic accuracy that Apple, which jettisoned Supermicro servers from its data centers for reasons it said were unrelated to this issue in 2016 and disputes the account, and Amazon, which vehemently denied the report, have both attacked the article (as well as Supermicro, of course). Nevertheless, we are informed by Raptor today that the Raptor systems, from the Talos II to the brand-new Blackbird, are designed and manufactured in the United States and are not subject to this issue. In addition, Raptor verifies manufactured boards against their own schematics, and OpenBMC as used in the T2 family is completely open-source. The Supermicro case that the T2 comes in has not been reported to be affected, and so far no malicious components have been identified in the power supplies or power routing systems, nor are we able to currently detect any in our system at Floodgap Talospace.