This is from Sawblades facebook page.
Sawblade Ventures, LLC
June 18 at 6:48pm ·
Getting our marketing approach ready for DAC 2018 (Design Automation Conference, San Francisco, Ca) is like prepping for the Apocalypse. You know everybody thinks you're a bit crazy. They know you say they're in great danger. But the sun comes up every morning and the birds sing and nothing bad happened. It's hard walking around with a sign saying "The End is Near" when everybody else says the experts are in control.
God save us from experts.
Sawblade Ventures, LLC is crawling out of its stealthy shell ready to preach to the unconverted after resurrecting our patented DAFCA (Design Automation for Flexible Chip Architecture) technology. As the technology was left dormant in 2012 with the business failure of Tiger's Lair, the semiconductor industry had to continue on their own, building home brewed tools to instrument their circuit designs. Since Sawblade's inception in 2015, we've watched as spectators of a slow motion crash while the software and hardware industries painfully endured destructive acts through many hackings and invasions that should never have happened.
Over the past three years, we've attended meetings and conferences and heard the optimistic soothing of information technology experts claiming 'everything is fine, nothing to see here, everybody go back to work... or whatever other thing you do with electronic devices.' And we've shaken our collective Sawblade heads at just how fragile and vulnerable the connected world is becoming.
As we've poked around in the muck to discover just where DAFCA technology would be best used, we've encountered many areas to serve. Much of it centers around Sawblade's ClearBlue ability to install granular monitors and modifiers into any part of a host circuit's DNA without requiring a remodeling of the host circuit. In other words, any circuit design of any kind can be outfitted with surveillance and defense counter-measures from the smallest vulnerability to an overwatch fabric able to characterize and defend the operating parameters of whole SOC (System on a Chip) semiconductor products.
Naturally, people who first learn about DAFCA ClearBlue intellectual properties assume it would be best tailored for chip security. True. But 'security' is at the root of many other classifications of protection and defense. As malicious action against electronic devices becomes more prevalent, functional safety is put at risk. This is a novel situation for hardware builders and they are struggling to grapple with human behavior as a hardware parameter.
The derived DAFCA technology was invented by Dr. Miron Abramovici, a pioneer in semiconductor testing. As testing methods are the foundation for proper verification and validation of semiconductor design, security is naturally a primary concern for the ultimate aim of that qualification process. But the concept of a testing fabric inside the chip working unseen and undetected that continues on into the operational life of the chip has been a difficult thing for the semiconductor industry to realize due to the ad hoc nature of most test regimes. Every team does it differently, as they should, knowing their own circuits best. But the tools they have used have been internal and informal, each company going it alone.
That was manageable as long as software appeared to be able to hold the line against attacks. But times have changed rapidly and the semiconductor industry is now realizing the software world alone can not protect them from harm. By that realization, the industry is now attempting to come to terms with the ultimate damage that may be done by malicious and malformed software able to hack directly into the internal operations of the processing chips that run the infrastructure and services of the civilized world.
Security, to Sawblade, is not a 'thing' to be done any more than putting up a high fence with barbed wire on top will keep people with bolt cutters out. Security is a process; a process that begins with validation of proper operational design and continues by making that process defensibly available inside the chip 24/7 for the life of the chip. That validation is not to be limited to simple fault matrices, but must now encompass constant surveillance of functional behavior to provide hardware and external software with tools that can shoulder the risk faced by system designers today. Buying a chip with a "trust zone" inside may give the customer a warm fuzzy at heart. But, in the head, a trust zone is a well known interface to hackers, counterfeiters, and malicious actors. The well known trust zone parameters can be used as an attack vector.
Bad guys learn faster than good guys.
The difficulty in trying to keep up with attack efforts has become so frightening that DARPA, in their SSITH initiative of 2017, called modern IT security a game of "Patch and Pray". Credit monitoring company Equifax was hacked September 2017 because one employee failed to activate one patch. Heads of major semiconductor manufacturers have since called for a unified cyber-security effort to prevent a global apocalypse in IT system failure by attack... all the while IT experts who know only the software story say everything is fine, go back to sleep.
At a conference in September of last year, Sawblade's CEO Scott Winning was one of four on a panel of security experts from the FBI and top security firms. The subject was on blockchain security. Scott was first up to answer the question: "What is the future of security for blockchain and all other IT systems." Scott doesn't shy away from the truth and replied "Encryption is doomed." He was referring to NSA (National Security Agency) statements concerning the elliptic-curve cryptography controversy (NSA backdoors installed in chips in the past) and the ultimate obsolescence that will logically progress from the current legacy industry approach and use of increasingly powerful machines.
I still chuckle at the loud gasp from the crowd in the room full of crypto-currency investors. Other panel members naturally poured oil on the waters when their time came to speak, but Sawblade has a warning to the electronics world and to the systems they support. The bad guys are smarter than your good guys and if you don't stop the 'not invented here' philosophy that cuts off development of true granular electronics surveillance for your designs, you can count on functional safety becoming a victim of behavioral malevolence in the near future. As more machines are connected to the internet via IoT (Internet of Things) for data access and automation, the safety of those machines and the people close to them is put at risk. Data protection is not enough.
As long as software was holding the fort for all these long decades, the hardware industry has been content to protect data flow by encryption through the signal traces of their circuits and call that "security". That approach is no longer enough. Encryption is a fine security solution. But it is not a defense posture. Somebody will come along with the perfect bolt cutters to cut through the fence we've all assumed would keep the bad guys out. When they get in, your hardware needs to be able to recognize the intrusion and act immediately - not after the fact.
Those perfect bolt cutters are being sharpened by artificial intelligence available to malevolent actors. The good guys need a pipeline for operational defensive components operating inside the chips to keep those cutters dull and unable to penetrate. The only way to do that is to actively prepare for the inevitable everybody insists will never happen. So, we're prepping for DAC and we're prepared to be laughed at because we're so small... knowing just how right we are.
Keith Guidry - CTO - Sawblade Ventures, LLC
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