"Designing and implementing malicious hardware"

[Perry E. Metzger]

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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