[121948] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: defending against evil in all layers of hardware and software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephan Neuhaus)
Tue Apr 29 11:29:26 2008
Cc: John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>,
Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
From: Stephan Neuhaus <neuhaus@st.cs.uni-sb.de>
To: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
In-Reply-To: <87prs9prsg.fsf@snark.cb.piermont.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:16:28 +0200
On Apr 28, 2008, at 23:56, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> If you have a rotten apple engineer, he will be able to hide what he's
> trying to do and make it look completely legit. If he's really good,
> it may not be possible to catch what he's done EVEN IN PRINCIPLE.
Fred Cohen proved in 1984 in his "Computer Viruses, Theory and
Experiments"[1] that "Program P is a virus" is undecidable. I assume
that this result can be applied to hardware in the form that "Chip C
contains malicious gates" is also undecidable. (Caveat: Cohen seems to
make the fundamental assumption that there is no fundamental
distinction between code and data, something that need not necessarily
hold everywhere inside a computer chip.)
Fun,
Stephan
[1] See for example http://vx.netlux.org/lib/afc01.html
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