4 ms·
This is really cool. It proves something that anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge about hardware and software should understand intuitively; that the u
by ebbv 10y ago
This is really cool. It proves something that anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge about hardware and software should understand intuitively; that the ultimate trust for any computing platform is put in the hands of not the hardware designers, but the actual hardware manufacturer. That doesn't mean Apple, that means TSMC or some other foundry.
It's great that is proven, though, and not just intuited. This looks like some stellar work by the team.
- sevensor 10y agoI agree that this is a really interesting exploit, but it requires a lot of expensive part-specific work to get it right, as well as the assumption that the foundry does their own masks. Of course, our attacker could work for the mask shop instead, but then he has to do it exactly right the first time, which makes it even trickier. This is all to say that, when we see this attack in the wild, somebody with very deep pockets will have been responsible.
- ebbv 10y agoIf you have a bad nation state actor wanting these exploits in place I don't think it's beyond reason that they would go to any steps. Imagine they could get a backdoor into every smartphone on the market by getting TSMC to manufacture chips with exploits in them. You really think there's any feasible but difficult steps that would stop them from doing this?
- impdmnt2Prgrss 10y agoIf a graduate student and a postdoc can do it...