[118127] in Cypherpunks
The "ECHELON" Chip
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gary Jeffers)
Mon Sep 20 13:07:50 1999
Message-ID: <19990920163808.26058.qmail@hotmail.com>
From: "Gary Jeffers" <jeffersgary@hotmail.com>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 11:38:07 CDT
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Reply-To: "Gary Jeffers" <jeffersgary@hotmail.com>
The "ECHELON" Chip
Postulates:
1. NSA CHIPPING: The NSA either already has or soon will have the
major cpu chip makers designing in back doors to be opened by
signal strings over the Internet. This method is too elegant
and too cheap on a per target basis to pass up.
2. HARDWARE TRUMPS SOFTWARE.
Definition:
Echelon chip: A mass produced and marketed consumer cpu
chip that has been designed with an NSA required back door.
Here is how I believe that the NSA will activate the Echelon
chips:
1. The NSA would use a signal string over the Internet that would
match a string designed into the chip.
2. An instruction set is triggered in the chip that might say:
copy the next 1k bytes received from the Internet to a specified
address in RAM memory. Then set the instruction processing
register(IP) to beginning of the write. Then start execution.
This expands the door. This may crash the computer during the
session after the installation, but this may be regarded as
acceptable operational overhead. Then again, the NSA may make
a good guess for most installations and not crash the computer.
With Microsoft Windows, it would not matter. Crashes are
normal :-)
3. The program in RAM then possibly writes the next 200k received
from the Internet to hard disk. The file written to hard disk
would be the full door.
4. The program in RAM would then "infect" the computer using the
same techniques as used by viruses. For instance, the boot
sector or command.com could be altered to activate the back
door. Then, in normal operation, the back door would be
activated.
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