[Cryptography] TRNGs as open source design semiconductors
Bill Frantz
frantz at pwpconsult.com
Thu Sep 12 21:42:08 EDT 2019
On 9/12/19 at 7:35 AM, leichter at lrw.com (Jerry Leichter) wrote:
>Perhaps the NSA can, for relatively limited numbers of chips
>that it can build in its own "black" fabs. For some kinds of
>uses - a sealed box between a computer and a network that
>manages all the encryption - it's possible, certainly with NSA
>levels of funding, to ensure that the stuff that traverses the
>wire can't be attacked. But once the decrypted data is
>delivered to a general-purpose computer with "modern" levels of
>performance, the story is very different. (The same goes, for
>example, to all kinds of modern sensors, which contain quite a
>bit of computation within them, massaging the data before your
>"secure" machine ever sees it.)
It's not just NSA. Remember, old technology fabs are now the
stuff of home experimenters. I know one person who has a chip
fab in her kitchen. (I don't know what her SO thinks of this,
but they seem to get along just fine with each other.)
I have also read about another experimenter with a similar setup.
Her problem is that her kitchen isn't a clean room, but I bet
she gets enough usable chips to let her solve this kind of
problem for herself.
Indeed, Jerry is completely correct. When the data gets to a
modern computer, it's toast.
Cheers - Bill
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