On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 1:02 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
results. bunnie was playing devils advocate by saying even if you did this, there are still things that can be present but in an obfuscated manner, that could be malicious or careless.
there was a research paper a few years back which outlined that it would only take about 3,000 gates to compromise a processor (easily enough to implement a full RISC CPU).
that's about a million times less than what is in the current intel processors.
the point of the exercise was to illustrate how pointless it is do perform reverse-engineering of modern CPUs, given that the review process would be insanely complex and would almost certainly miss such obfuscated / hidden backdoors.
this is why both the chinese and the russian governments now design and make their own CPUs. in the case of china that's FROM SCRATCH. and using only trusted foundries.
l.