Crypto Bugs in IEEE Standard Expose Intellectual Property in Plaintext

By Catalin Cimpanu, BleepingComputer
November 4, 2017

Due to the use of weak cryptography in the IEEE P1735 electronics standard, attackers can recover highly-valuable intellectual property in plaintext.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) P1735 standard describes a series of methods and techniques for encrypting information about the hardware and software inner workings of chips, SoCs, integrated circuits, and other electronic equipment.

The standard is used to protect intellectual property (IP) for commercial electronic design and allows hardware and software vendors to mix their code together to create new products, while at the same time protecting their creation from reverse-engineering and IP theft.

In simpler words, IEEE P1735 is a DRM for low-level hardware components that allows code from different manufacturers to work together but remain encrypted.

Almost all hardware and software vendors use IEEE P1735 to protect their work, for obvious reasons.

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