"Designing and implementing malicious hardware"

Ed Gerck edgerck at nma.com
Mon Apr 28 16:21:06 EDT 2008


Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> No. It really does not. Shannon's tenth theorem is about correcting
> lossy channels with statistically random noise. This is about making
> sure something bad doesn't happen to your computer like having someone
> transmit blocks of your hard drive out on the network. I assure you
> that Shannon's theorem doesn't speak about that possibility. 

Yet, Shannons' tenth theorem can be proven without a hypothesis that 
noise is random, or that the signal is anything in particular.

Using intuition, because no formality is really needed, just consider 
that the noise is a well-defined sinus function. The error-correcting 
channel provides the same sinus function in counter phase. You will 
see that the less random the noise is, the easier it gets. Not the 
other around.

How about an active adversary? You just need to consider the 
adversary's reaction time and make sure that the error-correcting 
channel has enough capacity to counter-react within that reaction 
time. For chip fabrication, this may be quite long.

Cheers,
Ed Gerck

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