[117172] in Cypherpunks
Trusted Chips, keyboards, vpns, teenage cheerleaders
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Motyka)
Fri Aug 27 16:15:24 1999
Message-Id: <37C6CE69.51923FE1@lsil.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 10:44:10 -0700
From: Michael Motyka <mmotyka@lsil.com>
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Reply-To: Michael Motyka <mmotyka@lsil.com>
> Would it be practical for a huge State to force CPU chip
> manufacturers to design their chips with backdoors?
>
More likely than not. It occurs to me that an obvious one is having the
keyboard controller part of the chipset.The keyb is very vulnerable at
the HW and OS points and is maybe the most information-dense source of
user input.
A moderately interesting topic: continuing to operate even on an
"Untrusted Host" using secure communications between trusted apps. Sort
of the micro view of the problem of computing in an untrusted world
where the macro view is the hostility of the world between trusted
systems.
Example #1: There may be some value in having a keyboard that is
encrypted feeding an application hub on a suspect system through an
input that the HW and OS are not treating as a keyboard. IOW a serial
port. That hub then becomes used by applications that don't want their
keystrokes through the usual channels. Sort of acknowledge that your HW
and OS are compromised but useful nonetheless. Could be a small embedded
system at the keyb end. No problem to make really. Of course only a
matter of time before it's counter-countered but maybe some of the gurus
could offer some methods. Amusing - a "vpn" between apps running on a
single machine because you can't trust the HW and OS vendors to keep
their noses out of your I/O.
Would you lose that "Beat State" thing? Sounds like a cheerleading squad
at a football game rather than a meaningful political chant.
