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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

I'm out of my depth here, but I wonder that, since microchips are finding their way into all manner of places they shouldn't (e.g. Shahed drones and Russian missles), how hard would it be for batch identifiers to be made into the silicon. They can then be cross-ref'd to clients.

I know instances of Easter eggs finding their way into chips back in the day. Feels possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art

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This is often done already. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this is how they track things down. Silicon die usually have some burnable fuses that can be set once and at some point during manufacturing the wafer lot number and even XY coordinates of the die on the wafer are recorded. It helps track down yield issues.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-pentagon-rsqu...

  Each chiplet will itself have up to 100,000 transistors and include a two-way radio, data encryption engine and way to detect tampering—all while consuming under 50 microwatts (50 millionths of a watt) and costing less than one penny each. Identifying information on each dielet would be read using a penlike probe plugged into a smartphone.. a dielet would be inductively powered by the probe, which would communicate via radio frequency signals when placed within a half millimeter of the chiplet. The probe would relay encrypted information to an app on the smartphone.

https://archive.md/GTRrY

All except for the cheapest microcontrollers (everything above half dollar) have serial numbers (unique identifiers) burned into one time programmable memory.

ARM M0 cores at 9 cents have unique IDs burned into flash OTP typically in my experience.

Anyone remember the Dallas Semiconductor DS2400/DS2401

https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...

1-Wire, unique 48-bit ID. I don't remember the year it was introduced, or cost.

> 1-Wire, unique 48-bit ID. I don't remember the year it was introduced, or cost.

IIRC, their 1-wire temp sensors also have that (at least they did about 10 years ago when I was messing around with hobbyist electronics):

https://www.adafruit.com/product/374

Right some of them do. I just recall the cheapest STM32G0s not having them (though they did have OTP so you could burn it yourself).

The $0.10 WCH CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller has a 64 bit unique ID on each chip.

There is probably multiple ways to identify who the client is for a particular chip. The problem is that you'll whitelist clients instead of blacklisting them. This will affect business.

I wonder if it was possible to build chips in a way that they could disable themselves if used in a way not approved of by the manufacturer. Perhaps a set of pre-generated keys that have preset validity times. You would then need to contact the manufacturer to receive the next key in the set.

Probably too much effort for the gain though. For military chips maybe?

You really want hardware DRM to support your political ideology? Good thing this sort of thing has never been abused!

I hope whichever country/company that champions this kind of DRM gets their infra compromised and permanently disabled. It's absurd that we're at a point where we are entertaining this level of control as a possibility.

This is not going to end well for anyone.

I'm sure all your enemies would love for the US to add remote-disable to all the weapons.

On the other hand remote hardware disable being already in all military equipment the US sells to allies, just in case they ever change their mind, would be a cool conspiracy theory.

There are rumors that F35 has a daily changing unlock code. You need that code from the US to operate the aircraft.

imagine your phone turning into a rock because you loaded an image or song in your browser. Is that the future you want to have?

Then the manufacturer becomes a military target, since destroying their authentication infrastructure has the effect of disabling operational military hardware.

The military wants the simplest things possible. The only thing you could even reasonably want to have a way to disable would be crypto-related systems. For weapons, heck, even nuke missile codes are set to 0000 or something similarly stupid, because in crunch time you don't want to have to look up the code for launching a nuclear missile that is already secured by several doors of thick steel. A missile with a way to disable it would be a nightmare, some dumb military officer or enlistee would routinely destroy them by pressing the wrong button, guaranteed.

For anything programmable, _maybe_. But power management? Analog frontends? Very difficult...

What do you think Microsoft's been pushing for the last ten years? The impulse for control generally has truly awful unintended consequences.

Yeah, just sell people computers that are completely owned straight off the factory. "Sell" it to them but keep all the keys and use them to enforce policy on what's supposed to be somebody else's property.

Computing is heading down a very dark path if people are seriously suggesting stuff like this.

You can probably engrave with a laser. That art is fixed.

But I don't think we need more ways for the US gov. to track us.

Physical identifiers on the chip to identify the company of purchase isn't going to help the US government track you, they have far more useful methods.

Just becouse they have far more useful methods I am not very keen on another one.

There would have to be some 'know you customer' type of tracking for ordering from electronics suppliers to avoid liability. Like with banks.

DigiKey rejecting your order because who knows what their black box said.

It would hardly help versus people that can afford front buyers anyway.

And even if it would work the microchips still end up in bombs dropped on children since the gov. hand them over willingly in the first place.

Chips getting to China seems like a purely political issue to me.

That’s like saying you don’t care what the business side of your company does, you just want to write code.

Well, if your company goes bankrupt because engineering didn’t work with the product guys you don’t have a job anymore.

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