[5756] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eugene Leitl)
Fri Sep 24 17:16:23 1999
From: Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
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Message-ID: <14315.52326.451696.513844@lrz.de>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 12:09:26 -0700 (PDT)
To: Greg Rose <ggr@qualcomm.com>
Cc: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>, cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990924134327.00c08c00@127.0.0.1>
For the truly paranoid: it is perfectly possible to boostrap a working
Forth environment *by hand*, whether by hand assembly and flashing the
resulting image, or by porting eForth (or any Forths written in C) to
an embedded target.
You simply can't fit any Trojan in there: a minimal Forth OS can fit
into just 2 k, typical environments take 12..16 kBytes. Of course
you're abandoning any GNU/Unix compatibility, but the intrinsic
rewards of a Forth environment can be considerable -- I don't know of
any more productive system.
Is there a crypto code library out there?
Greg Rose writes:
> At 09:02 23/09/1999 -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> >By example, I
> >could verify the machine code for IDEA, but not PGP and certainly not your
> >favorite version of UNIX.
>
> Actually, while there are bugs and security holes, it's pretty certain that
> V6 Unix didn't have any crypto trapdoors ... and you can now own your very
> own source code license for early Unix including C compiler, complete with
> source for a PDP-11 emulator to run it on... this might come in handy one
> day as a stable, recreatable base.
>
> See http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/PUPS , the PDP and Unix Preservation Society.
>
> [Of course, what guarantees does one have about the provenance of the
> code? --Perry]
