New Lock Aims To End Chip Piracy 312
Stony Stevenson writes "Pirated microchips based on stolen blueprints could soon be a thing of the past thanks to computer engineers at Rice University and the University of Michigan. The engineers have devised a way to head off this costly infringement by giving each chip its own unique lock and key. The patent holder would hold the keys, and the chip would securely communicate with the patent holder to unlock itself. The chip could operate only after being unlocked. The Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits (Epic) technique relies on established cryptography methods, and introduces subtle changes into the chip design process without affecting performance or power consumption. With Epic protection enabled, each integrated circuit would be manufactured with a few extra switches that behave like a combination lock."
Physical DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
When it detects that it's a pirate copy, it says: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When it detects that it's a pirate copy, it say (Score:4, Funny)
Hurries and puts bleeding child in car. Turns key...
"I'm sorry sir, your patent offenders registry status prevents you from starting this car."
But car, I need to get to the emerg... "I'm sorry sir, your patent offenders registry status prevents you from starting this car."
Oh fuck it!
Dials phone
"I'm sorry sir, your patent offenders registry status prevents you from dialing this phone. Please seek the assistance of a non-offender in...
Re:When it detects that it's a pirate copy, it say (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Physical DRM (Score:4, Funny)
.. soon to be cracked, by a great army of brilliant chinese/taiwanese/etc.. engineers,
specialized in getting to know how everything works.
Just to remember, how long did it took to crack HD-DVD encryption ?
Not long enough to survive it's own extinction.
We all know the story's ending, it just happens too often.
Re:Physical DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a reason that Grey market chips get made of popular chips. Because the manufacturers are price whores and get them made at the cheapest plant in China. how about not paying the executive staff obscene salaries for their useless butts and have the items made in a location that is reputable and trustworthy?
finally, I found a way around the china syndrome of copying. Send them a Test firmware so they can test the product but not operate it, then you simply re-flash with a jtag jig when the good boards arrive. The china operation never get's their hands on the firmware so they cant copy the product.
The whole article is nothing more than an advertisement for a useless technology that only a uneducated CEO or CTO would read about in a trade magazine and make the rash decision to implement it without talking to his engineering staff.
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It aint that easy, most current production chips have protection for this built in.
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Perhaps you didn't see the 5th word in the summary: "Pirated microchips based on stolen blueprints..."
Oh dear God, it's frightening that any sane person believes this. I suppose you would advocate locking up the rich victim of any gang violence. Or why just victims - why not all peopl
Chip piracy != music piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
My company got burned by it a few years ago. We had an 8 channel DAC (the MAX5308) in our design which didn't have a drop in replacement from another vendor. We needed some parts, and the lead times from Maxim were too long, so we contacted some distributors and found someone who had these parts.
We had a bunch of boards built, and we started getting a high failure rate, which we traced back to the DAC. A closer inspection of the part revealed it had a date code that was before the actual release date of the chip! We contacted Maxim and stopped payment on the parts. Maxim took some parts for evidence (and I believe sent us a few samples to tide us over).
We were building $14000 units that were being deployed in military communications systems.
It turns out the counterfeits were coming from Asia. The distributor in question probably knew that the chips were counterfeit and looked the other way.
Semiconductor companies put a lot of effort in making sure there products are reliable. (If a PC board has 100 parts, what failure rate is acceptable in your chips before you start to have very bad yield issues? What if it's 1000 parts?). We, as a society, have come to count on things being reliable, and real danger can result when their not. It's not as bad as counterfeit pharmaceuticals, but it's not so far off either.
I don't know if this scheme will work or not. But it's a real problem, with real consequences.
Sure, great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Informative)
We've had it before, I believe it was called trusted computing [wikipedia.org]. Boy do people love how that has turned out [gnu.org], if I recall correctly.
I understand that a processor blueprint is not something that people want compromised. Throwing a technical attempt to solve the problem rather than dealing with human error is just putting the blame in the wrong places and throwing stuff at the wall hoping things will stick.
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Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing is simply trade (Score:4, Insightful)
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They do not care about anything at all except themselves, even the families are nothing more than accoutrements and decorations, pets to fulfil their own egos.
Just the same in this case, the people who cam up with this technology
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the capitalistic and democratic system we live under is inherently set up to reward sociopathic behavior, so those are the people who rise to the top in it.
Not that this means capitalism and democracy should be abolished; Stalinist-style communism as practiced in North Korea, for instance, seems to reward absolute lunacy, and I guess I'd rather have sociopathic leaders than insane lunatic ones.
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However as demonstrated by the eighties and nineties as well as the early 2000s corrupt centralised mass media is used yo effectively camouflages the sociopaths and allow them to remain in positions and gain even higher positions where they can do extreme harm. The internet is starting
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I dunno, maybe it's their fault for getting the chips made by the lowest bidder in a country that doesn't respect IP laws.
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Information doesn't disseminate itself. Someone has to start it. Who said it was the fault of the patent owner? It's not a matter of fault at all. The fault is not relevant even remotely.
I said it was a human controllable situation, not something of a technology solution. Aka it is the manufacturer who is at fault here, and whose responsibility is it to find a tru
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Informative)
Others who responded to my post have argued that you therefore shouldn't hire Chinese or other cheap chip production plants, because they are well known for failing to respect intellectual property and you have no possible recourse against them.
The thing is, businesses are always going to opt for the cheapest option. If this technological measure is cheaper than opting for a more expensive, "trustworthy" producer, then I don't think you have a case against it. This doesn't harm consumers in any way shape or form, simply because it doesn't involve them. The restrictions will have already been removed long before it reaches their hands.
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Whose fault is that? Why should anyone other than the business that makes that decision (aka patent owner) bear the brunt of that responsibility? Why should a manufacturer add a cost to their process and what incentive do they have to do so? Answer: none whatsoever.
It is the patent owner's responsibility to
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The chip is activated after manufacture but before shipping to the consumer. After it is activated, it never has to contact the patent holder again.
This is a technology to stop industrial espionage and has nothing to do with DRM or trusted computing.
Now, please, stop being a reactionary dumbass and STFU.
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It's this simple:
1) The processor is manufactured.
2) The fab customer receives the processors from the fab.
3) The fab customer unlocks them.
4) The fab customer pays the fab and sells/ships the processor.
There is no opportunity for anyone to observe or tamper with the unlocking process. No valida
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
However, since they have the blueprints to the chips, they can find the sections of the schematic that implement this activation system, create a slightly modified die where they're masked out to always return an "authorized" status, and sell THOSE pirate chips on the black market.
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlikely. The need to employ actual mechanics has never been a problem for people running chop shops.
Removing a generic feature from a chip design just isn't that hard. If you make it hard to remove, it won't be generic any more, and it will significantly add to the cost of developing each chip (already huge) - so nobody is going to do that.
And when would this separate run be made? (Score:3, Interesting)
At best somebody within the company could take the desi
Watermarks DRM (Score:4, Interesting)
It would have to be subtle enough to pass inspection by the original mask creators.
Instead of creating a bogus, complicated and expensive DRM scheme, just introduce a watermark onto the mask. Use the watermark to identify which manufacturer is selling the extra chips.
The counter of course is the good ole compare blueprints trick. However then we're back to what you mentioned before, the calibration expense issue.
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:4, Informative)
yeah, this isn't dvd movie crypto where the 'client' has to have access to a way to decrypt the movie.
this is the kind of crypto that can't be broken without a backdoor. of course since epic is built into the original chip blue print, just 'masking off that part' renders in a cpu that only spits out 'error, epic not found, halt now' that locks the chip from running. depending on how the chip maker designs this into chips, it's not like they can just engineer a 'mod chip' that tells the cpu everything is okay and to run code... the cost of trying to circumvent 'epic' instantly becomes more than you'd get for say, a pirate dvd player chip.
this is a big deal, really big, because right now sub standard dvd players around the globe are using 'pirate' chips, and usually 'pirate' code to run those chips. Prior to epic they were resorting to programming the firmware of retail dvd players to try and thwart piracy, but then the pirates just waited for a system to come out with the 'real' chip, and steal the firmware so they could program the pirate players themselves. or even worse just program them with 'firmware' downloaded off the net from god only knows the source..
epic will be used by countless dvd and blu-ray chip fabs, so they can benefit from low cost Chinese fabrication, and never have to worry about the design being stolen again.
i've tried to think of ways to break epic, but if it's on chip, tearing apart the chip to see what gets written on chip (especially if it's Different For Every chip) isn't going to work, a mod chip solution could work, but then you need to design a special chip, that only works with revision x. of the 'real' chip, and the cost of doing this is going to be somewhere in the $50 per modchip if you only sell a few hundred thousand of the pirate chip... the cost goes down if you sell millions of units, but most pirate chip stuff is so substandard that it only gets bought when it's 'carrying' a name brand that it isn't, and they do try their best to catch that kind of fraud.... and a big old mod-chip that isn't in the 'real' system makes it a really easy spot for guys with x-ray viewers to screen the stuff. so then you have to hide the 'mod-chip' as say a flash reader
so yeah, epic will very likely reduce the amount of counterfeit dvd players etc. of course, they can always just counterfeit the pre-epic designs, but better blu-ray designs are going to come along, and those will all (i'm guessing) feature epic.
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
The chip generate a unique Private Key when first powering up. The matching Public Key is sent to the IP holder for activation. Supposedly there is no way to force a chip to generate a known private key without modifying the masks.
Modifying the mask (blueprint) using a "microscope" (or other techniques), is much more difficult that just putting the original mask in the machine and churning out a few thousands of chips.
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I don't know anything much about the physical side of chip masks and manufacturing, but I think I know enough reasonably review the crypto and chip programming logic of the plan.
They spend almost the entire paper describing the system and how secure it is against the "front door attack". It is standard public key crypto. If you don't know the designer's private key then the chip is never going to invite you in the front door, end of story. For all intents and purposes it is mathematically
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Re:Sure, great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, though it's still pretty silly.
The outsourced manufacturing company wouldn't have the ability to activate them, so couldn't sell extras to the black market.
Since the whole problem is that the outsourced manufacturing company has the layout (blueprint), then they certainly would be able to activate the chip by removing the "lock" circuitry from the layout and manufacturing chips which require no activation! It may be a non-trivial task to reverse-engineer which parts of the chip are responsible, but if the money is there it is certainly possible and would be worth it.
In other words this lock would only exist on the legitimate parts, and wouldn't exist on the bootleg ones, and the bootleg chips would operate exactly like an "activated" legitimate part.
I think it's kind of ironic that the acronym EPIC was also the acronym used to describe the Itanium's IA-64 instruction set (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). Though I doubt this one will even make it out of academia.
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And then there's the Faith No More song with that name, which succinctly describes the attitude of the manufacturers who would back this system, as well as the response from users opposed to it:
"You want it all but you can't have it."
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in other words, like every existing anti piracy mechanism to date.
Re:Sure, great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but it's actually even worse. Because with normal DRM, you're trying to keep the guy who is watching the DVD from being able to copy the DVD.
But in this case, it's actually like you're trying to keep the guy who is making the DVD from being able to copy it. They don't even have to break your DRM or work around it, they just have to decide not to build it in.
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Except this really has nothing to do with the encryption. It has to do with a manufacturer deciding not to build the encryption into the product. All they have to is identify the signal that decides whether the chip "activates" and tie it to vdd. It's like if you're talking about the lock on a safe, and you said "well no lock is perfect", but the fact is that the person
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Realize that it's the LITTLE, high-profit customers (designers, hobbiests, etc) of the chips and their manufacturers that would suffer when they scrounge the supplier network for any available chip and need a special reader to use it you'll get blacklisted faster than you can blin
Tag: DefectiveByDesign (Score:2, Insightful)
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(And people still wonder why I hoard old hardware...)
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NASA (Score:2)
"The countdown is at 10...9...8..."
*technician rushes in*
"Hold everything! We forgot to unlock the MMU processor!"
"...and ignition!"
Chip Piracy, Eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't it sad when people think of piracy in terms of music, when the REAL piracy problems (counterfeiting) are those which involve fake electrical/safety/baby equipment (or food)?
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The chips need to be activated at the manufacturer's level, not the consumer level. It does this by an internal random number generator. So... Take one genuine chip, find out what it's random number/activation key is, then modify your blueprints to produce the SAME ID number (bypass the RNG) and then activate all of them with the same key.
This sounds n
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That's undoubtedly the tack they will take, since the company that originated the design would notice a large number of identical IDs coming from one source. The thing they really want to do is make it so that the original company never knows they made the chip at all.
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I wish I still had
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Or medicine [plosjournals.org].
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Even though those clone (counterfeit is misleading) medicines contain identical chemicals and work identically well?
Pharmaceutical companies are the biggest scum of the earth. If jacking the price on a medication that people need to live isn't profiteering I don't know what is. Why governments continue to allow this boggles my mind. Actually Brazilian governme
Re:Chip Piracy, Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
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And the vast majority of it is every bit as good as the original, because it's made in the same plants by the same people who do all the other outsourced manufacturing. There is never any particular evidenc
Re:Chip Piracy, Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You misspelled "makes back their R&D investment".
Not a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
This type of locking mechanism also brings up other points. Once the IC is "unlocked", is it unlocked for good, or just for a time period? Could some criminal organization figure out the method of re-locking it, then lock the machines who belong to the patent holder's customers? This would result in some decent havoc especially in embedded circuitry (HVAC systems, railroad switches.)
The article seems to be lacking substance as well.
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As if anyone would take -that- risk...
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Not to mention that if the manufacturer goes out of business, all the equipment stops working. As if anyone would take -that- risk...
Yet I see people with DRM-ed music bought from online stores such as iTunes that could go out of business and then the songs won't be able to be redownloaded. I see even more people (including me) who buy virtual games on current generation consoles such as the Wii/360/PS3 that if your HD goes bad or you run out of room (in the case of the Wii its rather easy to) Your stuck and can't get your data if the console gets retired or Nintendo/MS/Sony goes out of business. So yes, I can see people taking that
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As such if China Fab keep 10000 extra unit without reporting it to Company A, they wont be able to unlock them.
Of course they could always modify the process to remove the locking mechanism or to produce 10000 chips with th
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Well, yeah, if I'm understanding this correctly, that's the idea here - they want Company A to be the only ones who can unlock the chips, so the extra ones would be useless to the Chinese fab (and anyone they sell them to).
Still unlikely to work, but the scenario you describe is exactly what they are targeting.
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If a knockoff gets the blueprints, its fairly trivial to figure out where the DRM stuff is located and they can modify their fab process so that it doesnt include them.
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Thief #1 is ubersmart and simply backdoors the template so he can unlock the chip himself, even though it appears locked to the company.
Thief #2 is reasonably smart. Mask inspections will be against what the computer says the mask should be, not what the high-level description says it should be. Provided testing is s
Well, if they have the blueprint... (Score:3, Interesting)
if(bignastyDRM(uniqueDRMkey)==TRUE){}
with
if(TRUE){}
Yes, I know circuits are usually either designed with a capture program or modeled in VRML/Verilog -- but the logic still holds. Find out what part of the circuit locks the functionality -- and replace it with a wire to Vcc.
(Unless, of course, they will require the chip to communicate with the mothership every time it has to blow its little digital nose etc...)
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Giving new meaning to.... (Score:2, Funny)
Intul Inside! Powered by AMB! (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, show of hands, who has a pirated processor? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler? Is this really a huge problem? Doesn't it cost more to produce a pirate CPU than the potential profits from selling it? Methinks the issue is overstated, either that or the chip industry should contact the RIAA & MPAA's media moguls about an advertising deal (which is the same thing, overstatement but loud).
This targets gray market, not black (Score:5, Informative)
If someone gets the chip design and is copying it to be built in another fab, it'd be possible (difficult, but much less difficult than a complete chip redesign or re-engineering) to remove this part of the chip (and increase the profit margin, since A: no investment on research and B: more die per unit silicon.)
What this is going to affect is people who run a fab making legitimate parts, but also run the same parts from the same masks but keep them off the books and sell them independently of the company that owns the design -- OEM ripoffs.
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So for instance all those "third shift" stories about Factories in China?
Oblig. (Score:3, Funny)
...
President Skroob: "1 2 3 4 5? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!"
Hmm, this reminds me of something (Score:4, Interesting)
While it sounds promising, it still raises the little hairs on the back of my neck. Danger Will Robinson, danger!
The second (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps its unlocked once and good to go. I don't think its the consumer that is guilty of pirated chips, but computer companies that purchase elicit copied chips cheaper than from the OEM. This shouldn't affect us that much, besides a perceived increase in quality.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Holy crap (Score:3, Funny)
--
How many mod points will this bad pun cost me?
How is Chip "Piracy" bad? (Score:2)
Their largest customer (Score:2)
I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
I would think that building the Chips in the US or Europe where the fabs are more reputable would be a better cost effective solution than sending it to an orient fab and watch it pump out pirate chips left and right, or relying on some sort of activation scheme that these pirate hardware companies would most likely reverse engineer out of them anyway.
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It's pretty clear it is working for them and they can make money doing it, as they are doing well and like I said, their very newest fab is in Arizona.
This is dumb. I can crack it in two seconds. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is dumb. I can crack it in two seconds. (Score:5, Informative)
(Off-topic: the anti-spam mechanism atm gives an interesting result for my email address..."'poo' in gap" oO)
Actual paper does NOT cover this attack well. (Score:4, Informative)
They argue that modifying masks is a problem, which may be true. However, there are several stages of design data before the masks, and I would expect that a corporate-level pirate could have access to something early enough in the process that it could be modified by someone skilled in the art. Design data is probably transfered to the FAB as a flattened layout, with no circuit/design hierarchy. However, it should be possible for someone who knows the chip interfaces related to this unlocking mechanism to work backwards from them and find where to tie things off to make the chip work. The labor cost would probably be pretty low compared to the cost of prepping a second mask to manufacture the modified chips.
Re:Actual paper does NOT cover this attack well. (Score:4, Informative)
From my quick glance a the paper it looks like they scatter a bunch of XOR gates around the chip in non-fastpath areas. Chip won't work correctly unless those gates are set correctly. Those settings are transmitted to the chip using some sort of pki.
Even if you identify all the XOR gates, you'd have to brute-force test all combinations. 2^64 can get expensive really fast, especially if you only have access to the masks and have to manufacture test-chips instead of running the brute-force in a software simulation.
Internet memes in naming? (Score:2)
Overriding factor for implementation (Score:4, Interesting)
Error Message? (Score:3, Funny)
EPIC FAIL.
Same Non-Problem, Same *WRONG* Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
As I see it, this has two major problems with it. The first, of course, is that copy protection in any form is childish, stupid, and ultimately ineffective.
The second is a bit more down to earth -- this will become the bottleneck on the manufacturing line. Chips are manufactured in the millions, with hundreds of thousands falling off the line each day. These nimrods propose to authenticate every last one of them, using computationally non-trivial crypto, uniquely before they roll off the line.
Let's generously assume it takes one second to authenticate and activate a chip (not, that's not a ridiculously long time -- between crypto compute time and network latency to the Pacific Rim, this is entirely realistic). This means you can activate a maximum of 86400 chips per day. Maybe you can parallelize the process, and maybe you can't (depends on whether the people who wrote the authentication server were idiots or not). And if your OC-3 to the Internet gets a backhoe through it, "accidentally" or otherwise, all production in your facility stops dead. Wonderful idea.
This stunning idea also seems to assume only one patent holder will be interested in a given chip. The most cursory inspection of even a "simple" memory chip will reveal several patent holders, all of whom will doubtless insist on "activation" which, again, may or may not be parallelizeable.
Like all copy protection "solutions" presented throughout history, this is a really, really stupid idea. I can't think of any fab that would willingly sign on to this.
Schwab
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Think PHYs, not Pentiums (Score:5, Interesting)
abused (Score:2)
and second that the authors of various types of malware will find a way to exploit this and use it.
anything that can be turned on can be turned off.
one day your IT department gets an email saying that they will kill all your computers if you don't pay X dollars.
Yeah, I can see this working (Score:2)
-Strong financial incentive to break the scheme exists - Check
-Can be broken or crippled in a number of ways - Check
-Attempts to address a problem involving dozens of manufacturers, hundreds of factories, producing billions of microchips which get integrated into everything from toasters to cellphones, planes, and oil rigs - Check
-Scheme conveniently relies on the Internet for authentication- Check
-And, last but not least: features cheesy acronym
The research paper (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The research paper (Score:4, Informative)
- relies on the fact that *any* changes in the blueprint would be prohibitively expensive, could be, but just replacing components by pathways does not *sound* very expensive to me
- RSA key pair generation on chip: bad idea, RSA key pair generation can take a lot of time (ECC key pair generation could be used as a replacement), needs PRNG
- PRNG on chip might prove expensive (where does it get its entropy???)
- no mention of X509 or any other PKI scheme, lets hope they are smart enough to see that they need some form of key management scheme
- cost of maintaining a PKI (public key infrastructure) might be rather expensive, especially if both parties are new to the game
Overall, interesting idea, but I'm not so sure anyone would want this. Lots of hassle for the buyer without any benefits to him, this makes it 1) expensive, thus a less favourable solution to others without this scheme 2) more likely that they will screw up the PKI system that is needed for this to work.
Well, they called it EPIC, and we all know that it may take some time before EPIC products come out (e.g. this one [3drealms.com]
what a stupid idea (Score:2)
Am I Missing Something? (Score:2)
So what prevents the IC "pirate" from stealing? (Score:3, Insightful)
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What usually gets patented are various tricks, e.g. performing an operation more efficiently, faster, etc. The trick is to find the ones that make the chip useless or vastly inferior if the trick is not used.
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Even if you know exactly the specs you are trying to meet a high end chip could still take 10-100 man years of work or more. This ain't as simple as rocket science.
Cher Act? (Score:2)