[117775] in Cypherpunks
Re: hw vs sw, intel rng mystery
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Fri Sep 10 05:37:01 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990910013241.00a1f480@idiom.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 01:32:41 -0700
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <v03130302b3fd9f181ea4@[207.111.241.66]>
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Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
At 10:50 AM 9/9/99 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>("Open source chips" anyone? Not for a long while.
Sure - you won't see major commercial CPUs doing open source,
but improved FPGA and ASIC design tools make it much easier to do
chips for people who actually want them - John Gilmore's DES cracker
being a good (if expensive) example, but things are getting to the point
that a grad student can do an FPGA-based chip design as a class project,
and there are billboards on 101 about "FPGA2ASIC".
And there are enough ASIC-library companies who will sell you
copyrighted-source designs, which you can at least read the source
even though you can't use it for free.
Wasn't the original Stanford RISC chip relatively open source?
(if not necessarily openness-religion-of-the-week\(tm-compliantly open.)
> And to paraphrase Ken
>Thompson's paper from the 80s about how a compiler could subvert any
>system, what's the point of knowing how the RNG works if the chip itself
>can do other things? There may be ways to compartmentalize and modularize
>such functions so that subversion is not possible, but it ain't happening
>today. Or anytime soon.)
Yup.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
