Probably 10 years ago I wondered to myself - what if the Chinese had installed a “time bomb” in every major computer chip they sold? Not a bomb that explodes, just a feature that would disable the chip when it received some signal, or even reached a certain date. Perhaps they have been doing this for a decade. At the right time every device that uses their chips, billions of them, just go dead. Every cell phone, every computer, every router, every WIFI hub. Even the menu screens at McDonald’s. The banking system. Your TV set. Complete chaos and then they can make whatever move they have been planning. I was thinking along the lines of a novel but the real life pager situation has proven how effective this tactic can be.
Perhaps it’s not central to your scenario, but it’s worth pointing out that, contrary to what one might think, Taiwan, not China, is the world’s largest exporter of integrated circuits, aka computer chips.
I assumed this was Jeep’s business model.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Conpany, Ltd. produces the majority of very large scale integration (VSLI) integrated circuits, and particularly those at the 7nm and smaller scale and below that are used in modern laptops and high performance computing, but produces a lot of chips for integrated device manufacture, non-critical performance and embedded microcontrollers for IoT and applicance applications, mobile devices, BIOS chips (back before UEFI became standard), et cetera. The idea of having a hardware backdoor into these devices is not novel, and since the ‘Nineties hardware security analysts break down and reverse engineer many of not most of the common chipsets to look for vulnerabilities and backdoors, albeit originally out of concern that the United States might try to implement embedded surveillance (look up “Clipper Chip”).
Of course, the consumer grade embedded hardware is not secure-by-design (i.e. it is possible with just basic physical access to load unsigned firmware onto it), and most IoT and Internet-accessible systems like automotive and industrial CAN bus systems have little to no command authentication or encryption on them, so you don’t even need a hardware backdoor when you can just hack into the infotainment system of a Jeep and from there send signals to kill the engine controller or cause the transmission to lock up in Park.
Stranger
Please use your super abilities for good not evil.
“With great powers come great responsibilities…” Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben
This is not my experience. (Well, it might be technically true since you specified “load” and not “execute.” ) For production secure devices that I’ve worked on, including some mass market cell phones, a signature check is performed before executing non-ROM code. Unless you are suggesting a different level of vulnerability, which is potentially possible.