On: Essential Phone, available now

[exikyut]

* Sound of groaning *

Thanks. But ugh. That is both absolutely amazing and... well, what did I expect. Of course there are going to be process attacks :)

Hmmm. I guess the only defenses against this are

- trying to design the layout to get good "route coverage" via test routines (sounds hard)

- aiming for super-simple designs that make it difficult to constructively alter the design (pathological simplicity is one part of my idea; yet to determine viability)

- trusting the fab (ha!)

I wonder if using a huge process like ~30nm (or even bigger) would mitigate at all.

Edit: Small work fixes, added sentence

[pjc50 → exikyut]

It's much easier to just trust the fab. TSMC do not care about backdooring your hobby project.

If you really want to carry on down this route, I would say the most effective approach would be to regard fab interference as a strange form of "single event upset", and borrow high-availability techniques such as lock-step mode across duplicated processors or subsystems.

[exikyut → pjc50]

Interesting. I'm curious, what sort of cost level would someone need to be looking at to mount an attack like the BECKER-CHES one? It would be really cool to be able to say "this would be secure until an attacker starts spending $(X?)XXX,XXX." Everything's vulnerable, step 1 is to have a good idea of how vulnerable.

Lock-step sounds interesting but really really hard - the basis of my idea is security through simplicity, and packing everything onto the one chip so only signed encrypted data comes out. Breaking the design down so that lock-stepped processors would reveal tampering would probably violate integrity and likely have blind spots too.