[117737] in Cypherpunks
Re: hw vs sw, intel rng mystery
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Honig)
Thu Sep 9 16:33:01 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990909125755.0080d100@pop.sprynet.com>
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 1999 12:57:55 -0700
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
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Reply-To: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
At 10:50 AM 9/9/99 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>("Open source chips" anyone? Not for a long while. And to
There are many ways to make something inspectable that
do not give it away for free. On one extreme there
is the contaminate-everything-you-touch-FSF license; on the other
hand, NDAs. In between are all kinds of limited use licenses,
copyrights, etc. A (hardware or software) company could have a "you can
read our source, and use the tools to regenerate what
you find on the store shelves, but you can't market anything with the code
we reveal."
And this isn't just off-topic jabbering:
Some Estonians fabbed a combination IDEA / modmult chip. They
say the source is "available", to help verify their
state machine. Since these are academics, the code
may well be inspectable under pretty loose terms.
http://www.cyber.ee/infosecurity/projects/cryptochip.html
http://www.cyber.ee/infosecurity/projects/cryptochip.pdf
In any case, that group recognizes the trusting-hardware
problem.
>As for the hopes of reverse-engineering the RNG from probes, as mentioned
>above, good luck! It's not the packaging and epoxy and whatnot that's the
>limit, it's the many layers of metal used on today's chips. Our e-beam
>probes ran into serious, serious problems when only 3 layers of metal were
>in use: the probe cannot penetrate a conductor, let alone several
>overlapping and stacked conductors.
You're out of date.
>Given a large and well-equipped lab, there are some ways to strip down and
>probe interior gates, but this is a major undertaking. It was tough for my
>lab to do this in 1984. I'm glad I no longer have to try.
There are people who do this for a living. They will
give you masks, netlists, etc. if you give them a chip and $$$.
Anyone's chip.
Look into chipworks.com, etc.
"Its not cheating, its reverse engineering." That's why
you patent. Its also how manufacturers diagnose their
own stuff.
