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

[Dave Howe]

Tim May wrote:
> 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
> I heard ten years ago that the National Semi fab on-site was a lowly
> 2-micron fab. Which was enough for keying material.
Hmm. according to the link I found and posted, they *started* at 1-micron
and has been tracking its "industry partners" improvements in tech, 0.8
microns up to 1995 then .5 then onwards (with an eventual goal of 0.35,
although the piece was written in 1995 so they are probably on copper now
too)

> 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.
Non-volitile keying material on-chip requires only standard proms - much
cheaper just to buy those off the shelf; for that matter Industry standard
"smartcards" usually possess cpu, eaprom  program and eaprom data areas on
a single chip (and the application would actually prefer some sort of
dynamic memory whose contents will vanish if the power is removed from the
onboard CPU but we can leave that aside for now - smartcard chips often
have that too)
Some of that capacity is no doubt used and intended to bridge real or
artificial chip droughts (if a manu doesn't want to sell them a given
chip, or raises the price drastically because he knows how essential it is
to some secure device, the NSA can churn out a few thousand to fill in the
gap) but there are advantages to having a completely custom chip - if no
attacker could possibly know the layout, command set or capabilities of a
chip, that makes his job so much harder (not quite STO - if an attacker
has only one or two chips to attack, then every time he gets hit by a trap
that removes a crackable device; custom chips can have such things as
capacitive test pads (for detection of insulation removal) thin conductive
(but visually identical) layers that must maintain continuity, and so
forth.)