Vulnerability Development: RE: tcp/ip hardware offload

[Richard Masoner <richardm () masoner net>]

Liran Cohen wrote:

> Upgrading can be done today on most of the hardware products , almost
> every product in the field (networking) has a flash RAM which can be
> changed (shiva devices , routers etc...) , regarding errors in
> hard-coded software , there are already several patches and updates
> for many devices .

Are you talking about actual gate arrays?  or firmware which is run by a 
processor core?  I'm aware of how firwmare works, which is generally copied 
from a FLASH device to faster memory for actual execution by a CPU.  And I 
understand the PLDs and FPGAs are theoretically reprogrammable, but they're 
too expensive, aren't they?  You're not going to build an FPGA-based 
network adapter for under about US$ 5000, from what I understand (the 
iReady part is about $5.)
I've re-read the Intel datasheet, and it appears the TCP/IP offload is in 
firmware rather than hardware.  The Adaptec part, however, seems to be gate 
arrays; I haven't heard from anybody at Adaptec to prove or disprove 
this.  I did get a response from somebody familiar with iReady, and he told 
me that early spins of the chip had some bugs which you basically had to 
just live with.
I'm a software person rather than a hardware person, so feel free to 
educate me on this :-)
Richard Masoner