3 ms·

Is it possible to verify the chip's content is what it says it is? With software we can run some kind of signature generator and verify the signature of the bit

• bunnie 6y ago
  It's a bit like trying to detect whether you are running in a virtual machine or not. You can't trust a chip to run a piece of code to introspect on itself; instead a more reliable characterization of a chip may come from examining how it fails when you throw it stuff that is out-of-spec. For example, glitching the clock may lead to a repeatable behavior that could only be produced if no additional circuitry has been added to the critical path that leads to the glitch.
• octoberfranklin 6y ago
  > Is it possible to verify the chip's content is what it says it is? No, and that's the big problem. You can't even tell by grinding the layers off one by one and inspecting them with a microscope. There was a paper published recently showing how to backdoor a random number generator by fiddling with the dopants. No visual difference at any magnification level. I suppose you could test for it with an electron microscope but you'd have to know what you're looking for and where to look.
  • bzb6 6y ago
    Isn’t that the reason people aren’t supposed to trust the RDRAND instruction from Intel?
    • octoberfranklin 6y ago
      Correct.