[tt] "Designing and implementing malicious hardware"

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> -----

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:28:43 -0400
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com
Subject: "Designing and implementing malicious hardware"


A pretty scary paper from the Usenix LEET conference:

http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/

The paper describes how, by adding a very small number of gates to a
microprocessor design (small enough that it would be hard to notice
them), you can create a machine that is almost impossible to defend
against an attacker who possesses a bit of secret knowledge. I suggest
reading it -- I won't do it justice with a small summary.

It is about the most frightening thing I've seen in years -- I have no
idea how one might defend against it.

Hat tip: Bruce Schneier's blog.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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