3 ms·

The cost of backdooring is put not on NSA but on hardware vendors. They have to add extra silicon and that stuff costs. And there is a huge market of reverse-en

The cost of backdooring is put not on NSA but on hardware vendors. They have to add extra silicon and that stuff costs. And there is a huge market of reverse-engineered mostly-compatible clones, too. My idea was that I'm practically sure that if I'd take a small-enough MCU or FPGA it'd be NSA-free. Just because putting a backdoor there (and that backdoor has to be quite smart and listen for signals on a lot of pins, while being discrete about that) would seriously increase complexity and cost of the device. And that would be noticeable. Just don't believe this would went unnoticed for any long. As for SoCs - yes, they're complex enough and their interconnections are quite standardized. So, you're probably right.

dogma1138 11y ago
The NSA doesn't have to tamper with hardware to backdoor it, they can just as easily find a hardware/microcode bug. And as far tampering with the actual silicon goes, well if the device is complex enough to require substantial logic then you'll probably have room to plant a bug, a simple device won't need a complicated bug to begin with. And silicon tampering doesn't require you to implement an entire bug in the silicon it self it can be as simple as intentionally added flaw that causes an error or an errata when say exposed to certain radio frequency which in conjunction with other external or internal attacks might lead to an effective backdoor. We can build fractal antenna's on a tiny scale these days http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/nanoscale-etching-of-3d-fractal.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/nanoscale-etching-of-3d-fra... Incorporating something like that into silicon won't be that expensive, and all that it needs to do is maybe short 2 pins that put the chip into debug mode and GL discovering that in a postmortem.

3 ms·

The cost of backdooring is put not on NSA but on hardware vendors. They have to add extra silicon and that stuff costs. And there is a huge market of reverse-en

by drdaeman 11y ago

dogma1138 11y ago
The NSA doesn't have to tamper with hardware to backdoor it, they can just as easily find a hardware/microcode bug. And as far tampering with the actual silicon goes, well if the device is complex enough to require substantial logic then you'll probably have room to plant a bug, a simple device won't need a complicated bug to begin with. And silicon tampering doesn't require you to implement an entire bug in the silicon it self it can be as simple as intentionally added flaw that causes an error or an errata when say exposed to certain radio frequency which in conjunction with other external or internal attacks might lead to an effective backdoor. We can build fractal antenna's on a tiny scale these days http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/nanoscale-etching-of-3d-fractal.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/nanoscale-etching-of-3d-fra... Incorporating something like that into silicon won't be that expensive, and all that it needs to do is maybe short 2 pins that put the chip into debug mode and GL discovering that in a postmortem.