Microchips With Multiple "Selves"

Stony Stevenson brings news from Rice University about designing integrated circuits with multiple distinct identities, which could be used in new types of hardware-based DRM, among other things. From the news release: "'With "n-variant" integrated circuits, it is possible to design portable media players that are inherently unique,' said Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice and principal investigator on the project. 'New methods of digital rights management can be built upon such devices. For example, media files can be made such that they only run on a certain variant and cannot be played by another.' Koushanfar said content providers could also use n-variant chips to sell metered access to software, music or movies because the chips can be programmed to switch from one variant to another at a particular time or after a file has been accessed a certain number of times."

Comments

yay...

[pwolf]

Just another thing for bored programmers to play with.

Liar

[Woundweavr]

it is possible to design portable media players that are inherently unique,'

This is obviously untrue. If it can be manufactured once, it can be again and it can almost certainly be emulated.

Re:you can burn in any code

[pipatron]

<anal>Technically that would be PROM or EPROM, since the first two Es in EEPROM stands for "Electrically Erasable" which is precisely what you don't want in this case.</anal>

Re:*Ahem*

[Intron]

About 15 years ago I worked on a design that had to be split into multiple chips because we needed a lot of I/O pins. We realized that there were enough gates to put all four designs on one die and just activate one of them depending on a couple of program lines. That way we only had to make one mask and one set of test vectors (and pay one NRE) and we got four different chips. The PC board hardwired the program pins so we could just solder any chip anywhere and it became the right thing. That would be a good use of multiple-personality chips.

The use in the article seems to be: you buy what you think is a certain product, and it behaves differently and has different bugs from what everyone else buys. That would be the last product I bought from that company.