This is really interesting research: "Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware
    Trojans." Basically, you can tamper with a logic gate to be either
    stuck-on or stuck-off by changing the doping of one transistor. This
    sort of sabotage is undetectable by functional testing or optical
    inspection. And it can be done at mask generation - very late in the
    design process - since it does not require adding circuits, changing
    the circuit layout, or anything else. All this makes it really hard
    to detect.

    The paper talks about several uses for this type of sabotage, but
    the most interesting - and devastating - is to modify a chip's
    random number generator. This technique could, for example, reduce
    the amount of entropy in Intel's hardware random number generator
    from 128 bits to 32 bits. This could be done without triggering any
    of the built-in self-tests, without disabling any of the built-in
    self-tests, and without failing any randomness tests.

  via [1]Schneier on Security: Surreptitiously Tampering with Computer
  Chips.
    __________________________________________________________________

  My original entry is here: [2]Schneier on Security: Surreptitiously
  Tampering with Computer Chips. It posted Thu, 19 Sep 2013 23:20:32
  +0000.
  Filed under: InfoSec,

References

  1. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/surreptitiously.html
  2. https://www.prjorgensen.com/2013/09/19/schneier-on-security-surreptitiously-tampering-with-computer-chips/

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