4 ms·

Ok. Maybe that may work. But what about legal risks? extra-legal risks(like vanishing in the dead of night) ? soft risks - how would the wife of someone who is

by petra 11y ago

Ok. Maybe that may work. But what about legal risks? extra-legal risks(like vanishing in the dead of night) ? soft risks - how would the wife of someone who is just the customer will respond when guys in black suits will come to her home ? Or if you're method will work so well, are you sure TSMC/Samsung will even accept you as a customer ? Because it doesn't seem like something that could scale without the legal/political side and that's really much harder than the tech(which is hard, no doubt).

Kadin 11y ago
Many big players have vested interest in hardware platforms that are not tampered with out-of-the-box, or open to easy tampering, by their adversaries. The Chinese have an interest in having a hardware platform that doesn't have NSA code baked into it; the US government and major US corporations likewise want hardware that doesn't phone home to Unit 61398. The Russians don't want either but probably have their own ambitions. Etc. I think that in the next few decades it will become quite accepted that you choose your platform based on who your perceived "adversary" is. If you're concerned about the NSA, you buy a system that's Chinese from soup to nuts. If you're concerned about the PLA, you buy from a vendor with the US Government seal of approval. It remains to be seen -- and in truth, I am somewhat pessimistic -- about the availability of a hardware/software ecosystem that doesn't require compromise. Hardware fabrication is a capital intensive industry, and capital intensive industries are pretty vulnerable to coercion by the governments in which all their capital equipment sits. ("That's a real nice chip fab you have there. It'd be a shame if something...happened...to it. Maybe you want to reconsider your offer to help us out?") An open architecture that you could get from any number of vendors, and perhaps use to keep the vendors honest, would be a huge step in the right direction, though. But the underlying problem is extremely hard.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > Hardware fabrication is a capital intensive industry, and capital intensive industries are pretty vulnerable to coercion by the governments in which all their capital equipment sits. If the spec is open then it should be possible for a fancy lab to verify that the hardware is manufactured to spec, right? So if you have it manufactured in Taiwan but then have random samples verified by labs in the US, Japan and Europe, defectors could be detected. Then the manufacturer would have to risk destroying their business by getting caught inserting a backdoor.
  - arca_vorago 11y ago
    At the sizes we are talking about, it's plausible to put in a hardware backdoor that even grinding down could miss...
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Look up ChipWorks. They're Number 1 in doing this far as I know. Still potential to hide things or just make it goo expensive to find.

by petra 11y ago

Kadin 11y ago

Many big players have vested interest in hardware platforms that are not tampered with out-of-the-box, or open to easy tampering, by their adversaries. The Chinese have an interest in having a hardware platform that doesn't have NSA code baked into it; the US government and major US corporations likewise want hardware that doesn't phone home to Unit 61398. The Russians don't want either but probably have their own ambitions. Etc. I think that in the next few decades it will become quite accepted that you choose your platform based on who your perceived "adversary" is. If you're concerned about the NSA, you buy a system that's Chinese from soup to nuts. If you're concerned about the PLA, you buy from a vendor with the US Government seal of approval. It remains to be seen -- and in truth, I am somewhat pessimistic -- about the availability of a hardware/software ecosystem that doesn't require compromise. Hardware fabrication is a capital intensive industry, and capital intensive industries are pretty vulnerable to coercion by the governments in which all their capital equipment sits. ("That's a real nice chip fab you have there. It'd be a shame if something...happened...to it. Maybe you want to reconsider your offer to help us out?") An open architecture that you could get from any number of vendors, and perhaps use to keep the vendors honest, would be a huge step in the right direction, though. But the underlying problem is extremely hard.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> Hardware fabrication is a capital intensive industry, and capital intensive industries are pretty vulnerable to coercion by the governments in which all their capital equipment sits. If the spec is open then it should be possible for a fancy lab to verify that the hardware is manufactured to spec, right? So if you have it manufactured in Taiwan but then have random samples verified by labs in the US, Japan and Europe, defectors could be detected. Then the manufacturer would have to risk destroying their business by getting caught inserting a backdoor.
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  At the sizes we are talking about, it's plausible to put in a hardware backdoor that even grinding down could miss...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Look up ChipWorks. They're Number 1 in doing this far as I know. Still potential to hide things or just make it goo expensive to find.