[118491] in Cypherpunks
Re: Postulates for "trusted"/"maliced" soft and hard ware
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William H. Geiger III)
Wed Sep 29 20:31:23 1999
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 20:11:26 -0400
Message-Id: <199909300010.UAA03266@domains.invweb.net>
From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@openpgp.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <cypherpunks@openpgp.net>
Reply-To: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@openpgp.net>
>> Gary Jeffers wrote:
>>
>> POSTULATES FOR "TRUSTED"/"MALICED" SOFT AND HARD WARE
>> Question?: Is there currently such a thing as a cpu chip of
>> which we can be sure of its architecture?
>> Could there be in theory? If you had a trusted one, could you
>> use it to test another cpu chip?
In <37F29028.2561C9C@brainlink.com>, on 09/29/99
at 06:18 PM, Sunder <sunder@brainlink.com> said:
>Yes, sorry for the late post. You can be sure of the SPARC CPU's -
>because they're open sourced. search around www.sun.com. The SPARC V8
>cores are available to all. Building them however, requires a fab. Got
>a fab in your garage? Hmmm, didn't think so. :^) But don't feel bad, I
>don't either.
>Still, it's nice to know. :)
Well a fab is not needed to trust the chips. I have been thinking about
this quite a bit with the recent discussions on Intel's RNG. If the CPU is
open sourced then all that is needed is a lab with equipment to examine
the chips to see if what the fab is producing matches what's in the
published specs. Granted this is beyond my capabilities but is a less
expensive proposal than producing one's own chips.
--
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Hi Jeff!! :)
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