Karsten Nohl
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:33:02 -0700
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
It turns out that the counterfeit chips business is booming: http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207401126 In combination with the news about what as few as 1500 extra gates can do, this is especially worrisome.
Chip pirating is a huge problem. Part of the reason we think it is ethical to release the Crypto-1 details is the fact that pirated Mifare chips have been sold for years. Pirating becomes more widespread as the chip manufacturing is outsourced. The cost of manufacturing a small volume of chips is dominated by cutting the "masks" used in the lithographic process steps. Once these masks are built, shelling out more chip copies is relatively cheap which enables manufacturers to overproduce and sell pirated copies. Adding a backdoor to chips is a different story, though, since that would require cutting a second set of masks. I am assuming that there must be no backdoor in the legitimately produced chips since the client would detect it as a slight violation of some of their timing simulations. The client also often inspects the masks before the chips are produced and basically reverse-engineers the whole chip on that level. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]