> So what if one of the driver writers for one of the open source operating
> systems were to design a set of open standards for a hardware/software
> interface for chipsets in this class.
I guess the part I don't understand is why are open source folks so
wary of running black-box *.o binaries from a vendor but are quite
eager to use blackbox crypto cards (that effectively run blackbox *.o
firmware)?
While I don't think these cards really do contain trojans, they
certainly could at some point in the future. What prevents the
manufacturers from storing all keys into some on-chip nv-ram for later
retrieval? Ditto for the card intentionally leaking the keying data
into the cipher stream? At one point during the cold-war it certainly
seemed like the US did manage to slip a leaky key trojan into a well
respected company's cipher system.
http://mediafilter.org/caq/cryptogate/
-wolfgang
