[121988] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: "Designing and implementing malicious hardware"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James A. Donald)
Tue Apr 29 18:02:25 2008
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:34:59 +1000
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
To: Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
In-Reply-To: <481611B2.1000805@nma.com>
Assume the hook works by waiting for a very specific sequence of bits to
arrive along a wire, then causing an interrupt giving ring zero
control to the memory location following that which the bits came from.
No amount of testing is going to reveal the hook until it is used by the
attacker.
The hardware can be obfuscated, as in the innocent looking vote count
programs. Correctly reverse engineering every gate, and making sure
that it does in fact work as directed is likely to be hard, particularly
as it is easy to unintentionally build chips that do not function as one
would expect, chips where no one can figure out why they behave the way
they do.
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