"William H. Geiger III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> IMHO hardware based crypto is dangerous especially from a company like
> Intel that will not allow it's designs to be peer reviewed. Their entire
> attitude is "trust us we are Intel". Well sorry I don't. Intel's RNG and
> now it's IPSEC accelerator are to ripe of a target for TLA's to trust
> without complete, open, peer review. Until this happens, IMHO, it is as
> trustworthy as CAPI.
>
> [MODERATOR's NOTE: I'm sorry, but I find this totally wrongheaded. A
> 3DES ethernet card need not be "trusted" -- if the thing interoperates
> with other IPSec implementations, its correct, pure and
> simple. Indeed, the slightest flaw and it would not
> interoperate. Perhaps they could rig it to leak too much in the RF
> spectrum, but they could do that with the rest of the chipset, too,
> and you are using *that*.
If the thing has an RNG on board for any reason, that might not be
trusted, but I guess in practice it'll only use keys provided from
outside the card. I suppose you could rig it to return the secret key
in response to some secret "backdoor packet", but you'd be utterly
destroyed if you were caught, and you might well be caught. It's not
as easy as introducing an "accidental" flaw in an RNG.
But if PCK has looked at their RNGs and thinks they're good then I
suspect they are. I agree this is most likely a non-issue, I'm just
wondering what the theoretical possibilities are.
--
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