U.S. Reliance on Foreign IT: Mitigating Risks Associated with Foreign Sources of Hardware Components, Summer 2008 - Project 08-03

The focus of this project is to answer the question, How should the United States government address the risks associated with dependence on foreign supplied IT hardware in critical United States networks? Methodology included both outreach to government, security, and IT professionals, as well as independent research. The team first investigated the reasons behind the shift toward offshore hardware suppliers, finding that foreign tax benefits and incentives drive offshoring in high-tech sectors, America has been unable or unwilling to create strategy to remain on par with global trends towards incentivizing domestic manufacture, and American dominance in science and mathematical disciplines has declined. Following these findings, the team broke the hardware problem into supply chain phases, because the various stages in the IT hardware supply chain are vulnerable to subversion and counterfeiting methods to differing extents. The team's recommendation is to employ a holistic combination of a variety of technological and policy tactics in order to ensure malicious hardware is not included in critical systems. The original document contains color images.