Surreptitiously Adding a WLAN Antenna to a Printed Circuit Board

Printed circuit boards (PCBs, also known as printed wiring boards or PWBs) have been shown to be quite vulnerable to surreptitious alteration. Specifically, the design files that a company sends out to fabricate the boards are vulnerable, easily edited by third parties. Such editing can sabotage the board and can even be used to add components to the board, such as components that could be used to snoop on or control vital functions. Drawing on previous work that showed a microcontroller could easily be added, this shows an experiment in which a fully functional wireless LAN patch antenna was added to a set of design files. The added antenna would be difficult to detect by eye and would enable full two-way communications to an altered PCB.