[7200] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: NSA back doors in encryption products
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Honig)
Fri May 26 21:37:40 2000
Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.20000526073052.0080be50@pop.sprynet.com>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 07:30:52 -0700
To: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>,
Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
From: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
Cc: Rick Smith <rick_smith@securecomputing.com>,
"Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>,
John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>, cryptography@c2.net, gnu@cygnus.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1000524215148.30672M-100000@einstein.ssz.com
>
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At 09:54 PM 5/24/00 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>As to inserting a trapdoor in an FPGA, I don't see any reason at all that
>a trapdoor can't be inserted with the appropriate understanding of the
>state space and chosing a rare state to trigger your bypass.
Yes but *once* you've verified the RTL (and from them the masks)
you don't have to worry about some stray applet hosing your security.
You do with software.
A hardware bump in the wire (link encryptor), for instance is
very hard to get around (short of out of band 'tempest' et al. attacks)
