| ??? 02/26/08 17:15 Read: times |
#151493 - not only... Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Lynn Reed said:
The idea of a self-destructing chip is interesting. The key is to prevent it from destroying itself during normal operation of your design. Oh, not only that - the key is also to desctruct the chip and data irreversibly and unrecoverably. That's a less trivial undertaking than it might seem at the first glance - again, see the published papers of the Cambridge security group. Not to speak about other ways how to bypass any cunning security scheme. This is the classical arms race - the designer has not only to invent a security scheme, but have also the imagination of the intruders and try to circumvent his own traps at all costs... And, all this is really far from what the average embedded engineer here expects when speaking about code security... --- As far as brute-force copying is concerned - I simply don't believe this does not evolve together with the evolution of the microelectronic technology. An average scanning electron microscope is not rocket science and might be well within the reach of a "specialised lab". It's then "just" a matter of proper choice of modes of operation and a bit of software to get a proper contrast from each layer, and perhaps even the state of charge of individual FLASH cells (if it comes to that). I believe investment into such a setup may be easily beyond several megabucks, but what I am reading now on the net makes me believe that the "routine job" in these "labs" tends to be cheaper than one would like to admit. Again and again, this is all only question of money and the balancing of the said equation. And I am trying to find out at least the order of magnitude of the unknowns, to be able to solve it... JW |
| Topic | Author | Date |
| Obtaining maximum code security | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Worth it ? | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Protection with Patents | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| the value... again... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| "OCR"ing a Design | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| It's a brave man | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Specialist secure micros | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| this is a different form of security | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Huge NREs? | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| What if you don't bond out nPSEN? | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| why not drop !EA | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Don't Drop !EA! | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Couldn\'t you do that in another way | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Eliminating /EA | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| The value of PSEN | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| not only... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Brute-force copying | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| well, maybe... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Erase on tamper detect | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| Make the chip hard to access | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
| It's quite impractical... | 01/01/70 00:00 | |
few thousand dollars ... Not at all | 01/01/70 00:00 |