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From: rlglende@netcom.com (Robert Lewis Glendenning)
Subject: Re: Screw the people, crypto is for hard-core hackers & spooks only
Message-ID: <rlglendeC5wyr5.6u6@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
References: <C5qy3M.DE3@agora.rain.com> <19930419.155204.305@almaden.ibm.com> <1r4g7l$fdl@sunb.ocs.mq.edu.au>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 01:57:04 GMT
Lines: 35

In article <1r4g7l$fdl@sunb.ocs.mq.edu.au> ifarqhar@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (Ian Farquhar) writes:
>In article <19930419.155204.305@almaden.ibm.com> ameline@vnet.IBM.COM (Ian Ameline) writes:
>>  I also believe that someone will reverse engineer the clipper chip,
>>and knowlege of the algorithm will likely be fairly widespread. Any back-
>>doors or weaknesses would further discredit the scheme, and help grow
>>the market demand for a secure alternative.
>

There are companies (one in Canada, as I recall) which specialize in
analyzing chips to understand process technology, design rules,
... to understand the probable yield of the assembly line making them,
and therefore the probable current cost and possible future cost curves,
given design shrinks, statistical quality control -> better yields, etc.

Taiwanese, Japanese and especially Korean semiconductor manufacturers
have all (korea continues) reverse-engineered foreign chips and
produced the chip.  Taiwan and Japan have signed intellectual
property treaties, and now at least extract the gate/transitor level
design before laying the chip out again.  The koreans still
use mask-level copying, I believe.  At least, they are under a lot
of pressure to pass laws to meet international intellectual property
standards.

All this despite lots of attempts to hide the designs.  There are lots
of techniques to do so in both hardware and software design.

For a complex chip, there will be real intellectual effort extracting
the gate design from the transistor design, and the algorithm from
the gate design.  But it won't take two smart guys even 6 months, working
40 hour weeks.  Koreans work 60 or more 8)

Lew
-- 
Lew Glendenning		rlglende@netcom.com
"Perspective is worth 80 IQ points."	Niels Bohr (or somebody like that).
