[s-t] needle in haystack digest #3 (fwd from Nick.Barnes at pobox.com)

Tim May timcmay at got.net
Thu Nov 6 20:22:01 PST 2003


On Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 09:20  AM, Dave Howe wrote:

>> No Such Agency doesn't fab much of anything; they can't afford to.  
>> They
>> and their ilk are far more interested in things like FPGAs and 
>> adapting
>> numerical algorithms to COTS SIMD hardware, such as graphics 
>> processors
>> (a la http://www.gpgpu.org/).
> Why do they have their own fab plant if they don't fab anything?
> http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/facility/nsaspl.htm
>
The conventional--and convincing to me--story has been that they had 
National Semi (and maybe others) help them with local fabs. These are 
fabs for things like key chips (the ICs carrying keying material in 
whatever form, for Permissive Action Links, and ultra-sensitive kinds 
of stuff that they wouldn't the usual cranked-up fab workers in 
Sunnyvale or Nampa getting near).

I heard ten years ago that the National Semi fab on-site was a lowly 
2-micron fab. Which was enough for keying material.

Crunching chips, for special purpose computers, don't carry the same 
security requirements, as the secret stuff in the code that is being 
run and not the fuses or links being blown. For this, they would use 
whatever is out there.


--Tim May





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