Researchers can slip an undetectable trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs

lotuseclat79 · Sep 18, 2013

Researchers can slip an undetectable trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs.

New technique bakes super stealthy hardware trojans into chip silicon.
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Research paper download: Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans.

-- Tom

Dogbiscuit · Sep 19, 2013

Theodore Ts'o - Google+

I'm pissed that people keep telling people that there's an NSA back door in my RNG. There isn't.
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With respect, the problem is your statement is one that can't be proven. This is the advantage of open source code versus something sealed in hardware. So even if it is safe, from the perspective of perception and Linux's reputation, it's better that we not make that assumption.

Make no mistake, I'd much rather that we have RDRAND than not have it. I devoutly wish that ARM chips had a hardware random number generator that we could rely on, and so I'm very glad RDRAND is in the newer Intel CPU's. I just don't want to depend on it as the only source of randomness for my crypto needs.

And even if there is no back door in your RNG, how can we be sure that your RNG is what actually ended up getting shipped in the chips that ended up in consumer's hands? By its very nature, it's hard to test that an RNG is working as designed. You can try to do statistical tests, but a counter encrypted by a key known to the NSA will pass the statistical tests.

At least, with open source, people can recompile their software, and while we do need to worry about trojan'ed compilers, there are ways around that problem. But in terms of a potential back door in the hardware, there's really nothing we can do.
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lotuseclat79 · Sep 19, 2013

Hi Dogbiscuit,

Ted Ts'o is always a great read on these issues. On Sept 5, 2013:

Oh, I should add that just today I had to fight back an attempt by a Red Hat engineer to add a configuration option to blindly trust RDRAND and bypass the entropy pool: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/5/212
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-- Tom

lotuseclat79 · Sep 19, 2013

And then there is this thread posted in the all things Unix subforum: Torvalds shoots down call to yank 'backdoored' Intel RdRand in Linux crypto.

-- Tom

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