From: Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 18:08:02 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Bank transactions on Internet
In-Reply-To: <9604100832.AA06344@divcom.umop-ap.com>
Message-ID: <9604140611.AA3800@sturgeon.coelacanth.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>>>>> "Jon Leonard" <jleonard@divcom.umop-ap.com> writes:

  > My short answer: Yes, it's that cheap, but only if you already
  > work with the chip vendor and have the software tools to program
  > the chips.  If not, expect to spend many thousands of dollars...

Huh?  We're talking about modern FPGAs here.  The cost of the tools
necessary to actually *program* the damn things is very small, as
almost all of them are SRAM-based and programmed out of an external
EPROM, bus, or serial bitstream.

Sure, we've spent $50,000 on FPGA *development* tools, but we program
the serial EEPROMs themselves on $300 PC-based programmers which are
available -- as are the FPGAs and EEPROMs -- from Digikey, Allied,
Newark, etc., to anyone with a credit card.

Actually, in almost all of our designs, the FPGAs are programmed
in-circuit by application software.  If I were to design a hardware
key cracker, it would almost certainly be a simple ISA-bus card
containing a couple of big Xilinx FPGAs which would get programmed by
a simple C program.

[Funny thing -- there seems to be a lot of "theft" of satellite and
 cable programming by folks who know just enough to use a soldering
 iron, but haven't a clue about what really happens inside a set-top
 box.  How do they manage it, if they don't have the tools to design or
 reverse-engineer a cable converter?  Hmmm...]

-- 
Roger Williams            PGP key available from PGP public keyservers
Coelacanth Engineering        consulting & turnkey product development
Middleborough, MA           wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE
tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/