Re: How come DRM would provide anything?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

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