New Lock Aims To End Chip Piracy

Stony Stevenson writes "Pirated microchips based on stolen blueprints could soon be a thing of the past thanks to computer engineers at Rice University and the University of Michigan. The engineers have devised a way to head off this costly infringement by giving each chip its own unique lock and key. The patent holder would hold the keys, and the chip would securely communicate with the patent holder to unlock itself. The chip could operate only after being unlocked. The Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits (Epic) technique relies on established cryptography methods, and introduces subtle changes into the chip design process without affecting performance or power consumption. With Epic protection enabled, each integrated circuit would be manufactured with a few extra switches that behave like a combination lock."

Comments

Physical DRM

[QMalcolm]

Great.

Re:Physical DRM

[Lumpy]

Problem is it wont fly. Chips are made to be as cheap as possible. Paying a licensing fee and then requiring the damn thing to be on the internet to be activated is not only stupid but completely unmarketable.

There is a reason that Grey market chips get made of popular chips. Because the manufacturers are price whores and get them made at the cheapest plant in China. how about not paying the executive staff obscene salaries for their useless butts and have the items made in a location that is reputable and trustworthy?

finally, I found a way around the china syndrome of copying. Send them a Test firmware so they can test the product but not operate it, then you simply re-flash with a jtag jig when the good boards arrive. The china operation never get's their hands on the firmware so they cant copy the product.

The whole article is nothing more than an advertisement for a useless technology that only a uneducated CEO or CTO would read about in a trade magazine and make the rash decision to implement it without talking to his engineering staff.

Sure, great idea

[KublaiKhan]

Presuming that there's a constant internet connection, that the manufacturer's server is incapable of being cracked and maintains at least 5-9's uptime, and that anyone's stupid enough to buy a crippled chip with this on it.

Re:Sure, great idea

[poot_rootbeer]

The outsourced manufacturing company wouldn't have the ability to activate them, so couldn't sell extras to the black market.

However, since they have the blueprints to the chips, they can find the sections of the schematic that implement this activation system, create a slightly modified die where they're masked out to always return an "authorized" status, and sell THOSE pirate chips on the black market.

Re:Sure, great idea

[Chris Burke]

It doesn't sound like this is a consumer-level activation, but a one-time, manufacturer-side process:

Yeah, though it's still pretty silly.

The outsourced manufacturing company wouldn't have the ability to activate them, so couldn't sell extras to the black market.

Since the whole problem is that the outsourced manufacturing company has the layout (blueprint), then they certainly would be able to activate the chip by removing the "lock" circuitry from the layout and manufacturing chips which require no activation! It may be a non-trivial task to reverse-engineer which parts of the chip are responsible, but if the money is there it is certainly possible and would be worth it.

In other words this lock would only exist on the legitimate parts, and wouldn't exist on the bootleg ones, and the bootleg chips would operate exactly like an "activated" legitimate part.

I think it's kind of ironic that the acronym EPIC was also the acronym used to describe the Itanium's IA-64 instruction set (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). Though I doubt this one will even make it out of academia.

Re:Sure, great idea

[Chris Burke]

in other words, like every existing anti piracy mechanism to date.

Yes, but it's actually even worse. Because with normal DRM, you're trying to keep the guy who is watching the DVD from being able to copy the DVD.

But in this case, it's actually like you're trying to keep the guy who is making the DVD from being able to copy it. They don't even have to break your DRM or work around it, they just have to decide not to build it in.

Re:Sure, great idea

[insertwackynamehere]

Maybe the answer is to stop outsourcing.

Re:Sure, great idea

[asuffield]

For which you need people capable of doing that, who have to be paid. That might not cost as much as developing a new circuit from scratch altogether, but it _might_ be enough to make the pirating just not worth it.

Unlikely. The need to employ actual mechanics has never been a problem for people running chop shops.

Removing a generic feature from a chip design just isn't that hard. If you make it hard to remove, it won't be generic any more, and it will significantly add to the cost of developing each chip (already huge) - so nobody is going to do that.

Re:Sure, great idea

[Grishnakh]

When you put a bunch of sociopaths in control of government and corporations it is all about how well their immediate lusts can be satisfied, their greed and desire for more money, power and self gratification.

Unfortunately, the capitalistic and democratic system we live under is inherently set up to reward sociopathic behavior, so those are the people who rise to the top in it.

Not that this means capitalism and democracy should be abolished; Stalinist-style communism as practiced in North Korea, for instance, seems to reward absolute lunacy, and I guess I'd rather have sociopathic leaders than insane lunatic ones.

Not a good idea

[mlts]

In a number of countries that this chip is aimed for, what will happen is that some knockoff fab will disassemble the chip, figure out the masks, and just make and sell the same IC minus the locking circuitry.

This type of locking mechanism also brings up other points. Once the IC is "unlocked", is it unlocked for good, or just for a time period? Could some criminal organization figure out the method of re-locking it, then lock the machines who belong to the patent holder's customers? This would result in some decent havoc especially in embedded circuitry (HVAC systems, railroad switches.)

The article seems to be lacking substance as well.

Same Non-Problem, Same *WRONG* Solution

[ewhac]

Although the article doesn't expressly say so, I'm guessing chip "activation" occurs at the factory long before it's put in a tube and shipped to an OEM. So end-users will (probably) never see this.

As I see it, this has two major problems with it. The first, of course, is that copy protection in any form is childish, stupid, and ultimately ineffective.

The second is a bit more down to earth -- this will become the bottleneck on the manufacturing line. Chips are manufactured in the millions, with hundreds of thousands falling off the line each day. These nimrods propose to authenticate every last one of them, using computationally non-trivial crypto, uniquely before they roll off the line.

Let's generously assume it takes one second to authenticate and activate a chip (not, that's not a ridiculously long time -- between crypto compute time and network latency to the Pacific Rim, this is entirely realistic). This means you can activate a maximum of 86400 chips per day. Maybe you can parallelize the process, and maybe you can't (depends on whether the people who wrote the authentication server were idiots or not). And if your OC-3 to the Internet gets a backhoe through it, "accidentally" or otherwise, all production in your facility stops dead. Wonderful idea.

This stunning idea also seems to assume only one patent holder will be interested in a given chip. The most cursory inspection of even a "simple" memory chip will reveal several patent holders, all of whom will doubtless insist on "activation" which, again, may or may not be parallelizeable.

Like all copy protection "solutions" presented throughout history, this is a really, really stupid idea. I can't think of any fab that would willingly sign on to this.

Schwab

Re:When it detects that it's a pirate copy, it say

[andy_t_roo]

atleast until the people with the hundred million$ plans, and the billion $ chip plant spend a few hundred thousand on analyzing the plans to find the few transistors that do this and take them out, making pre-unlocked chips. - if a bunch of random hackers can do over current DRM, there's not much chance that this would last.

Re:Chip Piracy, Eh?

[Mr 44]

This is about whether or not some large US corporation gets their cut of the profits. Nothing more. It should be no surprise that they behave the same way as the mafia.


You misspelled "makes back their R&D investment".

Outsourcing is simply trade

[Colin Smith]

You do it every day. Do you manufacture your own bread? Butter? Do you manufacture your own hardware components? No, because someone else can do it better and cheaper.