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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kash johal who wrote (50025)	2/18/1999 1:36:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571011

Kash, I think even Intel agrees that the Pentium III serial number isn't perfect security, but rather an "extra layer of security" on top of the regular password system. The best hardware-based security I can think of is an RSA-style public-key system. Some hardware device, whether it be a PCI card, a PCMCIA card, or even a CPU, can have a public key (which is also used as a serial number) and a corresponding private key. The private key is kept internal to the device; not even the owner can extract the private key if he or she wanted to. The device will have streaming (MMX-like, if you will) instructions which will take data streams and perform operations on it with the internally-stored private key. I think a group at IBM was developing something like this to go along with their servers or mainframes. Tenchusatsu