US Warns Hidden Radios May Be Embedded In Solar-Powered Highway Infrastructure (reuters.com) 91
U.S. officials issued an advisory warning that foreign-made solar-powered highway infrastructure may contain hidden radios embedded in inverters and batteries. Reuters reports: The advisory, disseminated late last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, comes amid escalating government action over the presence of Chinese technology in America's transportation infrastructure. The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered "in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS," referring to battery management systems.
The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China. There is increasing concern from U.S. officials that the devices, along with the electronic systems that manage rechargeable batteries, could be seeded with rogue communications components that would allow them to be remotely tampered with on Beijing's orders. [...]
The August 20 advisory said the devices were used to power a range of U.S. highway infrastructure, including signs, traffic cameras, weather stations, solar-powered visitor areas and warehouses, and electric vehicle chargers. The risks it cited included simultaneous outages and surreptitious theft of data. The alert suggested that relevant authorities inventory inverters across the U.S. highway system, scan devices with spectrum analysis technology to detect any unexpected communications, disable or remove any undocumented radios, and make sure their networks were properly segmented.
The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China. There is increasing concern from U.S. officials that the devices, along with the electronic systems that manage rechargeable batteries, could be seeded with rogue communications components that would allow them to be remotely tampered with on Beijing's orders. [...]
The August 20 advisory said the devices were used to power a range of U.S. highway infrastructure, including signs, traffic cameras, weather stations, solar-powered visitor areas and warehouses, and electric vehicle chargers. The risks it cited included simultaneous outages and surreptitious theft of data. The alert suggested that relevant authorities inventory inverters across the U.S. highway system, scan devices with spectrum analysis technology to detect any unexpected communications, disable or remove any undocumented radios, and make sure their networks were properly segmented.
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Far from a MAGA voter, but there were exploding pagers not long ago...
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Pagers that were enrolled into legitimate networks and are specifically designed to receive signals from anyone. That is a bit different to what is described here.
Without a SIM card, these "hidden radios" cannot get called or contacted except by the local network operators. "China" can certainly not do it.
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:1)
What if they, just for example, flew a cheap radio transceiver overhead with a balloon [wikipedia.org]. Or a swarm of them?
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I guess you have no clue what the power requirements for a cell tower are. And what the range and life-expectancy of such a balloon is.
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov] says 2G and 3G base stations needed about 2.5 kW per sector -- but that could be done more efficiently with today's hardware that with 15- to 25-year-old gear. Wikipedia says that 2023 balloon could generate about 10 kW, so what's the problem?
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The problem is that if you can cover an area of around 35km in diameter (you can do less because of vertical distance). Lets be generous and say 50km x 50km. That means you need to use about 4000 of these balloons to cover the US, each blasting out at 1kW or so of RF power and lighting up any passive SigInt equipment like a Christmas tree doused in gasoline and set on fire. Don't you think somebody would notice? Oh, and these balloons are non-steered, so you have no control as to where they go. Yep, sounds
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Who says it has to be a cell tower? There's plenty that you could do with LoRa [wikipedia.org]. Or you could have a local operative do a slow drive-by and check in over WiFi or Bluetooth.
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First, the story talks about cell tech. Second, LoRa has about 10km range in practical conditions. Also, if you have a "local operative" that is willing to make their location blatantly obvious by blasting an RF signal, then these people can already do much more damage directly.
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The cell towers are already installed and running courtesy of your local telecoms service.
All these devices need to do is connect to them which is trivial code to hide in the device.
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:2)
Why play what-if, when still no additional information has come out since May. And this is a note from the DoT/Federal Highway Administration? Seriously...
So... with guidance to search for and deactivate whatever it is, has anyone done so since May when two anonymous Department of Energy? officials leaked whatever this is the first time? Has anyone found anything? Keep looking? Does it smell funny to anyone else?
Re:Jesus fucking Christ (Score:4, Informative)
Without a SIM card, these "hidden radios" cannot get called or contacted except by the local network operators. "China" can certainly not do it.
Did you miss the story earlier today? iPhone 17 Air Drops Physical SIM Slot Globally, Pushing eSIM-Only Future [slashdot.org] said in the summary that 75% of phone connections are going to be eSIM by 2030. Just because a cellular device doesn't have a physical SIM card doesn't mean they can't communicate. This will make it harder to identify hardware that has undocumented cellular components, you will have to identify the actual components instead of just going "WTF is a SIM slot doing there?". It will be almost impossible to identify if the manufacturer actually is trying to hide such hardware in a SOC or something like that, the only giveaway might be the need for an antenna but those are getting smaller and smaller.
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:3)
What the fuck are we even talking about, known instances of disabled cellular radios in industrial equipment where they might actually make sense in some configurations? Like pull them out just in case?
Or unknown unknown receivers in whatever that do who the fuck knows and could take any form?
A lot of the comments are going with the second one, and we might as well add it could be god damned aliens at this point. Until we know more... which is the same thing in May, and we don't know more. I'm going with th
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My take is they talk about on-chip radios without the RF circuitry and antennas, as the latter are blatantly obvious and do not qualify as "hidden" in any way. Little detail about such an on-chip radio without the external parts: It is essentially non-functional or extremely low-range.
Re:Jesus fucking Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely these are just highly integrated SoCs that include a cellular radio, as well as GNSS and maybe WiFi/Bluetooth.
It's normal in industry to use parts that have a bunch of peripherals that you don't actually need for that specific product. It's cheaper to mass produce generic parts than it is to cut them down for specific products, unless the volumes are in the hundreds of millions.
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Obviously. And without the antennas and RF circuits to attach them, these radios can do essentially nothing.
But talk about "hidden radios" and all the nil wits think there is actually working and usable communication equipment in there.
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Just because a cellular device doesn't have a physical SIM card doesn't mean they can't communicate.
E-sims still require provisioning. If there were thousands of active cell radios out there you would be able to tell through a simple audit with the telecom companies.
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Indeed. And it would be dead simple to block them all on top of that.
"simple audit of telecom companies" (Score:2)
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"SIM card" does VERY OBVIOUSLY refer to "physical" as well as "logical" SIM card.
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"SIM card" doesn't mean it has to be a physical card. It needs a recognized id attached to a paid for account with a (local) cellular service provider. That number might be a file on some flash memory in the device or it might be a file on some flash memory on a removeable card.
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Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:2)
The Federal Highway Administration did. Which should be the first red flag in this story. Why disregard one part of the story when the whole thing smells bad.
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You do understand that any SIM card comes with a lot of metadata, right? Like the originating Telco (which must exist for billing purposes while roaming), or no connection will be made. If there really were SIM cards (physical or logical) in there, it would be dead simple to block them.
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If China is ordering your cell providers around then you've got bigger problems.
Oh, right. [wikipedia.org]
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eSIM's are a thing and would be inconspicuous to someone who wasn't looking for it. However the cellular antenna would be immediately obvious since there needs to be 15mm for 5G and about 30mm for LTE of antenna wire, so if you x-rayed it you would see it.
With that said, a less obvious use for said radios is probably to reconfigure them remotely if there is a vendor programmed eSIM. But my stronger guess here is they used the same hardware for some other device and the actual antenna and sim card pins aren'
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That doesn't imply that the chip didn't have a built-in radio, just that it couldn't transmit or receive without some ancillary mechanisms.
I suspect the claim is technically true, but the reason is that the chips were designed to be sold to different people to do different things.
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Yep. And to create FUD, they people behind this "story" just talk about "hidden radios" and conveniently leave out that they are non-functional. Lying by misdirection at its best.
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The SIM card does not matter because of its physical representation (which is zero with a logical SIM card). The SIM card matters because it comes with a lot of information. The modem does not even get a connection if the SIM provider does not confirm it is theirs when the cell-operator contacts them. And that would make blocking by SIM extremely simple.
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or something that some customers wanted but others did not, and it was cheaper to ship it in everything than to make multiple designs.
Very likely this. Also note that if it is cell-tech, it needs a SIM card to work at all (except for local emergency calls) and if it is WiFi, it needs some network log-in fror a local network. Given that data-only SIM cards can be cheap (about $5/month here), this may be an option for some customers, but the SIM would be customer-provided as roaming would make it excessively expensive.
Ignore this wumao troll (Re:Jesus fucking Christ) (Score:2)
Pagers that were enrolled into legitimate networks and are specifically designed to receive signals from anyone. That is a bit different to what is described here.
Without a SIM card, these "hidden radios" cannot get called or contacted except by the local network operators. "China" can certainly not do it.
Nope. Your entire post is just wumao boiler plate BS -- pretend the technical risk doesn’t exist, wave your hands about why it “can’t” happen, and hope the thread gets derailed.
The real threat, the one you are trying to minimize, is surreptitious radios enabling side channels to exfiltrate data like location, usage, and control signals they sniffed. Radios enable latent remote control vectors, even if “sleeping” until a trigger. Radios don’t need a SIM card to tran
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Bla, bla, bla. You have no substance in your posting. None of what you claim can be done without blatantly obvious RF circuit and antennas. And these cannot be "hidden". Even is made invisible, X-rays, resonance-tests, and other methods can find them reliably.
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"Undocumented cellular radios"...seems strange. Thoug our (expensive, Canadian mfr) office coffee machine had a cellular data radio for updating prices, etc. It's not "documented" in the manual, unless you know how to parse the description of the update mechanism.
But wouldn't one expect some sort of communications device in a generator controller? Admittedly, you'd expect it to be documented. The big question has to do with whether or not the cellular radio has the ability to connect to a random network *as
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Pagers that were enrolled into legitimate networks and are specifically designed to receive signals from anyone. That is a bit different to what is described here.
Without a SIM card, these "hidden radios" cannot get called or contacted except by the local network operators. "China" can certainly not do it.
What makes you think that?
I have a 462.900MHz transmitter sitting on a shelf in my workshop. It was previously used by metro-area paging company here. It's just a transmitter. The pagers don't transmit anything to it. It will transmit anything that comes in via encoder/modulator, and anything within range tuned to 462.900MHz will detect that transmission. How the receivers act upon that transmission is another matter, but they will hear it. It doesn't matter if there's a paging company, or a pager sys
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What you entirely gloss over is that you need widespread infrastructure to connect to these things. That infrastructure is not there. And the other thing is that as soon as there is an antenna and off-chip RF circuitry needed to attack that antenna, the while thing does not qualify as "hidden anymore".
My take is there is an entirely non-functional "radio" (without antenna and RF attachment circuit) in there and that is used by the ones behind this story to create FUD. Because most non-experts have no clue
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Perhaps. It has become common for multi-capability circuits like that ESP32 chipset to be used even when most of the interfaces on it aren't necessary. That was the first thing that came to mind actually.
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That is also a likely possibility. An ESP32 is entirely within the cost-range that make it a valid choice even when not using the RF capabilities. I would not go so far as to call it a "hidden radio" though. But maybe the ones behind this story would.
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Are you talking about the Israel thing? (Score:3)
I don't know if anything else.
I mean yeah having our entire supply chain completely dependent on China who we are setting up his hour new Cold war buddy probably isn't the best thing in the world but the only way to get off that addiction train is trillions of dollars of government spending that's just not going to happen. Those trillions are already earmarked for about 1,000 American billionaires...
And besides it's not like we a
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Seems legit to me
https://www.reuters.com/sustai... [reuters.com]
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Ligit? The first paragraph of that story reads:
"U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said."
And all you did was repeat the link in the precis.
To put a finer point on it, the alleged administration is above making shit up in the same way a brick is above the Sargasso Sea (thanx Douglas Adams).
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My mistake, you didn't repeat the precis link to a Reuters story, you posted a link to another Reuters story which said the same thing.
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:2)
Echoing the others' sentiments. Exploding pagers. Compromised cellular network hardware. Supply chain attacks like this are exactly the sort of thing on nation state actors' playlists.
Entirely plausible (Score:1)
And anyone who has ever used a $2 ESP32 microcontroller should know just how plausible this could be...
Those things are scarily powerful for their price (likely a dumping strategy) and could quite easily embed a BLE or WiFi backdoor into anything from a disposable vape (which contains a microphone for your puffing convenience of course) to a car to an industrial robot, and so I would not be at all surprised to find them in Solar inverters.
Quite frankly, with its roughly 1MB of obfuscated/encrypted ROM, and
Critical thinking would be nice (Score:3)
Trump is not going to help prevent any sort of supply chain attack. And frankly there isn't going to be one.
Like the man said it's a big club and you ain't in it. There's about 2,000 billionaires in this world and they aren't American and they aren't Chinese and they aren't French or German or anything else. They are billionaires.
And they
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These are likely for management systems. Standalone devices are very difficult to manage and monitor, and if you don't even have power cables to it they're even harder. China is expanding its infrastructure at a truly phenomenal rate, and unlike the US they appear to be planning for the long term. Corporations here will throw things out in the field willy-nilly with no consideration of how the customer will manage this equipment in the future, that would not be tolerated in China. If it can't be managed
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Are you reasonably certain that this claim is false? Remember that the US is trying to do something similar to NVidia chips. Also lots of chips are multipurpose, with the same chip being sold to different people for different functions.
I'm not sure I believe it, but I'm also not certain it's wrong.
Oh, solar *infrastructure* (Score:2)
For a second there I thought this was going to be about that terrible solar freakin' roadways idea again. God that was stupid.
Duplicate story (Again) (Score:5, Informative)
This was already reported and discussed on Slashdot in May.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
- Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar inverters
- Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries
- U.S. says continually assesses risk with emerging technology
- U.S. working to integrate 'trusted equipment' into the grid
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Yes, the radios were discovered and discussed long ago, but THIS story is not a duplicate.
A new announcement was made by the government. (to distract us from some totally-fake-hoax-thing..)
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Which one?! There are so many awful things that I'm supposed to not be paying attention to, it's hard to remember.
Re: Duplicate story (Again) (Score:2)
Yup, from two unnamed Department of Energy Officials in May.
And now a note from the Federal Highway Administration.
We still don't know anything. It's hard to believe.
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It's not hard to believe. There are lots of plausible explanations. Most likely some of the chips are multi-function,but sold to do one particular job (so only partially documented).
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Maybe. So? (Score:1)
Embedding "hidden radios" does absolutely nothing unless there are SIM cards in there. They are not a backdoor into the equipment. They cannot be called or contacted.
Seriously. Details matter.
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good thing they said they were cellular radios and not "low power two-way satellite radios.
Re: Not likely cellular phone based (Re:Maybe. So? (Score:3)
good thing they said they were cellular radios and not "low power two-way satellite radios.
Right, because as Abraham Lincoln said we are to believe everything we read on the internet.
I don't know what kind of hardware was discovered
... why do you think ANYTHING was discovered? You can't take PART of it with a grain of salt, take the whole thing with a grain of salt. It's not like the source has a great reputation for honesty or integrity. In May it was "two unnamed DoE officials", and now it's from the U.S. Department of fucking Transportation? No additional information, no manufacturers, no specific equipment, just check everything? With instructions to disable and remove... what? What was found, discrete components, a SoC, WHAT?
The
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My take is there is a "radio" in some of the chips and that may be either cell or WiFi. But since the claim is "hidden", this radio will not have the blatantly obvious and relatively large antenna and RF circuit. Hence that radio is non-functional.
Obviously, the story is FUD and aims at people that have no idea what "radio" actually means on the hardware side.
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BE AFRAID!! BE VERY AFRAID!!
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Abd then you look at what satellite communication actually needs and you realize that there is no way to "hide" the respective hardware. Details matter and you do not have them. How pathetic.
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Embedding "hidden radios" does absolutely nothing unless there are SIM cards in there. They are not a backdoor into the equipment. They cannot be called or contacted.
Seriously. Details matter.
I haven't seen a physical SIM card in 5 years, everything I own uses eSIM now.
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Did I write "physical SIM card" anywhere? No, I did not. Obviously "SIM card" comprises physical and logical cards.
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Did I write "physical SIM card" anywhere? No, I did not. Obviously "SIM card" comprises physical and logical cards.
You said "card" and that's a physical thing that you can easily identify. A eSIM looks like any other surface mount chip which makes it much more difficult to detect. The MMF2 from 2013 is 6x5mm, the MFF-XS from 2020 is 2.6x2.4mm, and the iSIM from 2021 is less than 1 sq/mm total.
The point being is that these can be present and you'd never know. Baseband processors are already pretty damn small, and you don't need the full feature set to receive a text message so it can be made even smaller. The antenn
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Embedding "hidden radios" does absolutely nothing unless there are SIM cards in there. They are not a backdoor into the equipment. They cannot be called or contacted.
Seriously. Details matter.
Hidden radios are already out-of-the-box thinking, so it's not a huge stretch to imagine this thing paired with more out-of-the-box ideas. For example, phones compromised with malware are not an uncommon thing. If some small but significant percentage of phones are injected with malware that is complementary, the hidden radios could piggyback via the phones to communicate back home, sort of like how AirTags work. Sounds a bit far-fetched, but so are hidden radios.
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No. "Hidden radios" are radios without blatantly obvious antennas and RF circuitry. And, guess what, they are also non-functional exactly because they are hidden. If you do on-chip antennas without making the chip massively larger, you can do maybe a few meters and that is it.
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Why bother. Just embed an ansible in each highway sign.
That explains it (Score:3, Funny)
China is Ciscoing us (Score:2)
Wait I thought this was a good thing back when we did it with Cisco equipment, it's a bad thing now?
All we hear (Score:3)
All we hear, is
Radio Ga-Ga
There might be a Russian under your bed too! (Score:2)
I read it on the internet so it must be true!
and are the reds hiding (Score:2)
Proof? (Score:2)
I guess now it's a national security issue (Score:2)
right to repair? (Score:2)
All of these devices should be legally required to include their schematics. Incorrect schematics should incur a hefty fine.
The hidden energy infrastructure risk (Score:2)
“On May 15, 2025, federal investigators disclosed that undocumented "ghost" communication modules were embedded in some Chinese-manufactured solar inverters. China produces about 70 percent of the world's inverters, according to the International Energy Agency.”
“Multiply that share across the millions of distributed energy resources (DERs) the United States will deploy this decade and you have a networ
How about shielding? (Score:2)
It seems like requiring shielding of all inverters before installation AND require inverters be installed in an additionally-shielded grounded thick metal box to resist physical tampering with provisions to prevent RF leakage through wiring and wiring penetrations would be a straightforward solution here.
Inverters emit significant EMI in the first place and should be shielded. Shielding prevents radio signals from coming in or out just like it prevents EMI and radio-frequency interference.
Just make su
Pathetic (Score:2)
Your sinophobia is pathetic, truly pathetic.