re screw the people crypto is for hard core hackers spooks only in article r g l fdl sunb ocs mq edu au ifarqhar laurel ocs mq edu au ian farquhar writes in article almaden ibm com ameline vnet ibm com ian ameline writes i also believe that someone will reverse engineer the clipper chip and knowlege of the algorithm will likely be fairly widespread any back doors or weaknesses would further discredit the scheme and help grow the market demand for a secure alternative there are companies one in canada as i recall which specialize in analyzing chips to understand process technology design rules to understand the probable yield of the assembly line making them and therefore the probable current cost and possible future cost curves given design shrinks statistical quality control better yields etc taiwanese japanese and especially korean semiconductor manufacturers have all korea continues reverse engineered foreign chips and produced the chip taiwan and japan have signed intellectual property treaties and now at least extract the gate transitor level design before laying the chip out again the koreans still use mask level copying i believe at least they are under a lot of pressure to pass laws to meet international intellectual property standards all this despite lots of attempts to hide the designs there are lots of techniques to do so in both hardware and software design for a complex chip there will be real intellectual effort extracting the gate design from the transistor design and the algorithm from the gate design but it won t take two smart guys even months working hour weeks koreans work or more lew lew glendenning rlglende netcom com perspective is worth iq points niels bohr or somebody like that
