Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea?

alan alan at clueserver.org
Tue Jul 25 17:18:22 EDT 2006


On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

>
> EE Times is carrying the following story:
>
> http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190900759
>
> It is about attempts to use cryptography to protect chip designs from
> untrustworthy fabrication facilities, including a technology from
> Certicom.
>
> Unlike ordinary DRM, which I think can largely work in so far as it
> merely provides a (low) barrier to stop otherwise honest people from
> copying something they find inexpensive in the first place, it seems
> to me that efforts like this are doomed.
>
> It is one thing if you're just trying to keep most people honest about
> something that doesn't cost much money, and another if you're trying
> to protect something worth millions of dollars from people with
> extremely sophisticated reverse engineering equipment. In particular,
> people who operate fabs are also in possession of exquisitely good
> equipment for analyzing the chips they've made so they can figure out
> process problems, and the "key injection" equipment Certicom is making
> could easily be suborned as well.
>
> I'd be interested in other people's thoughts on this. Can you use DRM
> to protect something worth not eight dollars but eight million?

This has already been attempted with video game machines back in the 80s 
and with consoles like the X-Box more recently.  In both cases, the 
encryption made it more difficult, but not impossible.

There seems to be this idea that if we just use enough DRM, or enough 
encryption, we can overcome its weaknesses.  It is like saying if we wish 
for something hard enough we can overcome the laws of nature.  (And if it 
didn't happen, we did not wish hard enough.)

But enough about US foreign policy...

-- 
"I want to live just long enough to see them cut off Darl's head and
  stick it on a pike as a reminder to the next ten generations that some
  things come at too high a price. I would look up into his beady eyes and
  wave, like this... (*wave*!). Can your associates arrange that for me,
  Mr. McBride?"
                       - Vir "Flounder" Kotto, Sr. VP, IBM Empire.


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