Counterfeit Goods

The issue of counterfeit manufactured goods first started to interest me in the mid 1980's when I watched the launch of a small sailing cruiser in Portsmouth Harbour. The craft was manoeuvred into the water using a large crane and heavy lifting straps. A few moments after the cruiser floated free, the inboard engine was engaged. Those of us standing close to the harbour wall had an excellent view of the propeller flying off the shaft like a Frisbee, leaving the proud boat owner owner floating helplessly in the water in front of an amused audience.

At low tide I helped recover the propeller and found the remains of the nut that was supposed to have held in in place - it had split neatly in two. A colleague at the University where I worked at the time examined the nut and after testing and declared it to have failed because it was manufactured from a non marine grade steel. The nut is still probably in use as an examination item in vivas today, as an example to new engineers of how you cannot always trust the label.

Since that time I have come across many counterfeit items hidden in batches of genuine products: brass plated screws amongst solid brass screws; mild steel hacksaw blades instead of tool grade steel; mild steel jemmy bars so soft I could do an impressive strong man act in the store where I purchased them; and computer memory without the chips inside. Moving up the value chain, while attending an information gathering mission on end of life recycling of electronic goods, it became clear that some goods were not made of the materials specified, and that some electronic housings contained hazardous fire retardant chemicals that necessitated very special handling, even when manufacturers markings identified the materials used as benign. In each case I believe the company selling the goods almost certainly to be innocent and duped by a substitution that occurred much earlier in the supply chain. The problem is not confined to consumer goods, as there are also a growing number of examples of counterfeit personal health care goods too.

When we think of counterfeit goods the usual definition is: not genuine; imitating something superior. But this is now not always the case. The counterfeit goods may have all the properties of the genuine article, plus a few more. Perhaps we should call them Trojan counterfeits. The US Pentagon certainly seems to acknowledge the possibility of "kill switches" embedded in microprocessors as a real example of the threat presented by such counterfeits.

At a more domestic level, this got me wondering about the routers many of us use to connect to the Internet. I recently threw the router provided free by my ISP away. Sorry, I mean responsibly disposed of it at my local WEEE recycling point. The reason being that I was inconvenience by recent changes to the software inside that had been automatically downloaded. I have no reason to suppose that the changes made were anything other than to make the routers easier to remotely maintain, but what if the "bad guys" out there installed programs into my router. Could they monitor my Internet activity and get the keys to my on-line bank account?

Perhaps this raises a new very practical question: It is not possible to construct a test for the presence of Trojan features that have unknown properties, so how do I verify that a product is free from such features? The engineers who are responsible for cyber security have been addressing this type of issue for since the birth of the computer virus in the 1970's. Perhaps the product manufacturers and consumers are going to have to learn some new lessons when it comes to validating products. Maybe the "please register your product on our website" card is about to take on new a new value?