![]() ![]() Not much later, in 1997, an anonymous post to an Internet newsgroup warned users of another problem, the so-called F00F bug, affecting all P5 series processors. The extent of the risk was much disputed at the time, and still today we are not sure if it was “really an issue” at all from security point of view. But under certain circumstances – like enumerating prime numbers – these small discrepancies may have added up and caused entirely wrong results, potentially causing even hardware security consequences. You may think that this is not a huge difference most users would not even notice it. This bug was caused by some missing values in a lookup table resulting in incorrect results when dividing certain pairs of numbers. The first hardware problem that made it to the headlines in 1994 was the FDIV bug that was present in the early versions of 60–100 MHz P5 Pentiums of Intel. To quote the well-known Murphy’s laws: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. And this brings hardware security to the table. More complexity – be it hardware or software – brings more possibilities to make a mistake. But, as always, with great power comes great responsibility. While the first circuits – like the transistor radios sold in the 50s – contained less than 10 transistors, the Intel 4004 processor released in 1971 contained 2250 transistors, the 8080 released in 1978 contained around 29 thousand and the infamous Pentium processor released in 1993 had over 3 million. Modern hardware consists of millions and billions of integrated elements. Long gone are the times where a transistor radio contained only a couple of stand-alone transistors, resistors, capacitors, and coils. ![]() So, just as any other computer system, they must be designed and implemented with security in mind. Yet these devices are lacking essential security, while they may have some resources attracting attackers. Even ordinary toys are getting intelligent. Just think about home automation, intelligent light switches, heating, door locks, security cameras. More and more devices which are not complicated enough to warrant a fully blown computer. More and more devices that connect to the rest of the world. Hardware security is an emerging issue as there are more and more devices around us. The hardware parts like CPU or memory of modern devices can also be vulnerable. ![]()
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