[121569] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
"Designing and implementing malicious hardware"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Thu Apr 24 21:33:48 2008
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:28:43 -0400
A pretty scary paper from the Usenix LEET conference:
http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/
The paper describes how, by adding a very small number of gates to a
microprocessor design (small enough that it would be hard to notice
them), you can create a machine that is almost impossible to defend
against an attacker who possesses a bit of secret knowledge. I suggest
reading it -- I won't do it justice with a small summary.
It is about the most frightening thing I've seen in years -- I have no
idea how one might defend against it.
Hat tip: Bruce Schneier's blog.
--
Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
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