Via puts RNGs on new processors

[Bill Frantz]

At 11:43 AM -0700 4/9/03, Ian Grigg wrote:
>David Wagner wrote:
>> Do you worry about this for your CPU?  If not, why should
>> the RNG component of your CPU be any different?
>
>I "worry" only mildly about this for the CPU. ...

The most credible CPU attack I have heard of (from Norm Hardy) is to have
two particular floating point operands cause the next instruction to be
executed in privileged mode.  If these values occur in a normal program, it
won't notice that it had system control for one instruction.  A Trojan
horse program can use it to get control of the machine.

Cheers - Bill


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