Speaking for the 600-pound gorilla in the IP world, ARM Fellow Rob Aitken described a spectrum of trust relationships, ranging from the relationship ARM might have with a new, basically unknown start-up to their relationship with their oldest silicon partners.
In the former, he said, encryption might help. In the long-standing relationships, it would be in the way. Aitken went on to raise two interesting issues. First, he pointed out that the countries in which ARM would most like to have strong encryption are the very countries that are subject to export restrictions on encryption technology. Second, he observed that any encryption scheme must allow enough visibility for the user to debug the IP while still protecting it from duplication or reverse engineering.
Finally Michael Horne, group director of marketing at Cadence, cited several daunting challenges to IP encryption. “Security is a process, not a static achievement,” he said, suggesting that any successful scheme would become the same permanent cat-and-mouse game against hackers that we now see in the music and video worlds. He also warned that there was a multi-way trade-off between the simplicity, trustworthiness and computational overhead for any encryption scheme, and that a successful one might have to live in a very small optimization window.
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