Secure JTAG – A Motorola Initiative

For those who have been in their labs, struggling with embedded devices, plundering the JTAG hole to their advantage. I have news for you, manufacturers are wising up to thy game. American giant Motorola has taken the first step by putting time money and initiative into something they are calling Secure JTAG. This functionality not only allows for limited access, it allows for authenticated priority based access. It is quite amazing when you think about it.

The whole security feature of course had to be behind the JTAG so as to block the latter. It cannot be software implemented, or can be easily overridden. So the whole system is hardware based and has been implemented inside the processor it seems. To even if I manage to remove the chip from the circuit I can for the life of me not disable the mechanism even physically.

It is primarily a three party challenge response based protocol. It is based on elliptic curve cryptography. Interested people might want to go check out the paper… the research is cool… cant say the same for the writing… :sigh:….

www.motorola.com/techpubs

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