EE Times is carrying the following story: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190900759
It is about attempts to use cryptography to protect chip designs from untrustworthy fabrication facilities, including a technology from Certicom. Unlike ordinary DRM, which I think can largely work in so far as it merely provides a (low) barrier to stop otherwise honest people from copying something they find inexpensive in the first place, it seems to me that efforts like this are doomed. It is one thing if you're just trying to keep most people honest about something that doesn't cost much money, and another if you're trying to protect something worth millions of dollars from people with extremely sophisticated reverse engineering equipment. In particular, people who operate fabs are also in possession of exquisitely good equipment for analyzing the chips they've made so they can figure out process problems, and the "key injection" equipment Certicom is making could easily be suborned as well. I'd be interested in other people's thoughts on this. Can you use DRM to protect something worth not eight dollars but eight million? -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
