3 ms·

I wonder if you could solve the fab issue with some sort of xray based checksum that is reproducible by third parties (maybe universities?)

• exikyut 8y ago
  University security would not be adequate for the purposes of attestation for the level of stringency required. Universities are primarily academic environments that specialize in narrowly focused ideas and they hold up poorly to eg nation state level exploitation. You're building something for the purposes of verification, not manufacturing; it doesn't need to actually build working chips, it just needs to scan them. So you don't need the same level of exacting precision throughout the design+fabrication process. And so it's easier to build in not just 1 "ooh, interesting", you could build in 1,000. I really do think so. We now have precedent that maybe there's vested interest in hiding stuff. So security requirements would be so high as to make the project unviable because of its domain obscurity. The above said, very interesting idea. I like it. It's a very difficult problem domain though.
• MertsA 8y ago
  An xray or optical inspection would never be able to detect the doping of the silicon so it's possible to alter the behavior of the chip in such a way as to allow an attacker to cripple something like Intel's random number generator RdRand yet have this be basically undetectable in software.