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Re:Essential Phone, available now by pjc50 on Friday August 18, 2017 @11:58AM (#15047317)
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.

Re:Essential Phone, available now by exikyut on Saturday August 19, 2017 @07:26AM (#15052789)
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.