On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 17:53 +0100, Pierre THIERRY wrote: > What I wanted to say is that in contrary to generic chips like our CPUs, > those TC chips can be very easily tweaked to insert backdoors. As I'm > ready to trust Intel not to tweak it's Pentium to enable some Hurdish > backdoor, it's easy for the TC chips to insert a TC backdoor, as they're > very specific to a security issue.
Actually, this isn't true, exactly *because* these chips are security specific. The chip designs, and the process by which they are fabricated, is actually quite well reviewed. The only part of these chips that is "secret" is the bits of the secret key. They are not "black boxes" in the sense that you mean. It is true that the manufacturer will not let you, personally, come validate these chips. It does not follow that the chips are not validated. shap _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
