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

[Thor Lancelot Simon]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 03:49:11PM -0600, Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
> 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.
> >
>
> http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads
> 
> which basically puts keygen and minimal number of other circuits in the 
> chip. keygen is executed as part of standard initial power-on/test ... 
> before the chips are sliced and diced from the wafer.

So, you sign the public key the chip generated, and inject the _signed_
key back into the chip, then package and ship it.  This is how the SDK
for IBM's crypto processors determines that it is talking to the genuine
IBM product.  It is a good idea, and it also leaves the chip set up for
you with a preloaded master secret (its private key) for encrypting other
keys for reuse in insecure environments, which is really handy.

But do we really think that general-purpose CPUs or DSPs are going to
be packaged in the kind of enclosure IBM uses to protect the private keys
inside its cryptographic modules?

Thor

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