Project: ATRS

[Sere Reene]

Bootana Hutta Region – Gos Hutta System - Kor Oktanivii Planet​

​

Location: North Continent
Deep in Hutt Space.
FFE’s Main Production Facility, Punta Outman Geesa, or Dead Outlanders
In the rubbled filled interlinked cities of Seutta and Nuttaon



Project Designation: ATRS - Advanced Tamper Resistant System.
Technicians Involved: 32
Expendable Henchmen on Site: Several
Spice Sticks Ordered: 650
Bottles of Liquor stocked: 7,000
Handovers expected: One.

The dome shaped facilities often nicknamed deadballs, affectionately so or just as an insult, depending on your mood, today they were scene of the usual boisterous arguments going on. Coming to the attention of FFE was that their vast plans for a wealth of guns could simply be taken to pieces, copied and replicated by another with less effort than stuffing five jawa sideways into a vat of trandoshan brandy, which admittedly wasn’t often tried but the point remained. FFE wasn’t going to start releasing things on mass until it had a viable counter tech to jawa stuffing, or any reverse engineering method that might be tried for that matter.

Sere was tapping her tail, not anxious for everyone to settle down, she just liked the core drive rock that was blaring out, it calmed her, like everything.

"Boss urrrr..."

"Yes?"

"Jandal's not urrrr coming?"

"Why?"

"He had an urrr fall, he urrr, blew his leg off, but it got better."

Right then, now that important piece of business was settled by Bssik her large intellectual Trandoshan guardsman, her lackey fired a gun upward to settle everyone down, the cry from above as someone fell from the balcony, was entirely incidental and unrelated, at least it got everyone's attention.

 

[Sere Reene]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATIFjrjXgNw​

Sere held her pawlike hands up, making everyone pause, and waited for the core drive music to really start to get her in her groove, only when it was fully underway did she drop them. A lackey lit up the holoboard, the lights dimmed and the blue board came up, which as usual someone had to remove some clutter from to see more clearly.

Advanced Tamper Resistance, Tri-Defense Approach

1. Physical Packaging
2. Software
3. Hardware

They were not shooting for a simple system here, it was going to take some effort, but then cracking it would become increasingly more difficult the more effort they put in. She had three speakers ready, one for each subcomponent of the design, the modular units for the MWP were going to be just that, standardizing a system for each would be easy enough. However standardizing a design that could be extended to things like a large ship turret, was an entirely different hurdle to tackle.

Physical packaging was going to be handled by her rodian tech Xexi Tetsu, an arguably the hardest of the three, so they were starting with that. Jittery as ever Xexi was fiddling with her hands, and looking for something to hold or smoke, so someone passed her a spice stick, a mild sedative this one, it calmed her to only work at lightspeed not hyperspeed, both traits Sere valued in her employees.

 

[Sere Reene]

“It’s no good us starting this till we know who our threats are, and what their likely ways in are.” Xexi said, putting her hands behind her back and pacing. There were several grunts and a few squeals of surprise from the motley assembled aliens, someone was being all professional, where was the yelling and gunfire?

“So who is likely to want to reverse engineer our tech?” She posed the obvious question, but it perked a few otherwise usually sleeping heads up while they discussed the likely candidates, several names were mentioned a few unusual thoughts on just how they’d disable their tamper resistance. One ex military shared his insights on how they made their tech Anti-Tamper, Sere noted his name for later, as a possible promotion to lackey or maybe even henchmen if he survived long enough.

Xexi was impressing Sere, taking the initiative, so far she was usually obstinate when actually asked to work, but she was really motivating people here with her commanding performance. Xanatos Skobra even stared down from up high on his usual balcony, the chief scientist and usual behind the scenes coordinator, wondering if his job was on the line, he was right to because it was if she could keep her head in the game like this on a regular basis. The trouble with spice addicts like Xeri was though you never could tell, which is why Xanatos stayed in his office with no temptations much during office hours.

 

[Sere Reene]

Sensor Mesh

A small globe hologram appeared on the often underused focusing chamber beside her, Sere’s snake-like headtails operating the controls at lightening speeds, while everyone else watched in a small amount of awe at how fast she could calculate what was being said to arrange a technical diagram, in this case it was a circular representation of all the data they held.

Xeri continued, “in high end devices a tamper sensing mesh is often used, to permanently erase Key materials, we intend to do the same here for the chips operating our upgrade packages and components.”

Wow Xeri really was pulling out all the stops, the management upstairs gulped and hurriedly got back to work, trying to not only keep up but also outdo her. “Crypto isn’t my forte, so I’ll leave that to Shabala head over here,” she smirked to the Weequay who was always insulting her, and being quiet as ever he said nothing in response, just blew his lips.

Sere just kept plugging away to input what Xeri was proposing, though it was a ragtag group here it was growing daily into an ever more impressive technical staff, if they could lay off the spice and booze long enough to avoid the crashes that followed, fat chance there.

 

[Sere Reene]

“In the test chip we’ve got here, sensor mesh was added above the actual circuit and below it, all paths in a standard mesh are monitored for interruptions or short circuits while power should be available,” Xeri went on to explain, it prevented laser cutting or etching access, making probing or editing even for an expert slicer nearly impossible, frying the circuits and deleting critical memory information making physically access the circuit highly difficult.

Circuit Sensors

Some of the techs were really into this, others stood there in half awe, half boredom, and one or two were just asleep, but that was the colourful crowd they had working here! “Bringing us to Sensors, spiraling the expense, but different types of sensors can be used to deflect glitching attacks, while ring oscillators scan a surface area to avoid probing, and light sensors can help guard against removing parts of the device that should be there,” she unveiled a second layer of the design on the holoboard, and Sere updated their working projected prototype in the metal casing to the side.

“That covers the bulk of the physss'sical attack'sss we can prepare against.” Sere added herself, and thanked Xeri, with a genuine pat on the back for the young Rodian, who was now off to help herself to a bottle of Trandoshan Brandy and a well deserved rest.

 

[Sere Reene]

None-fire, her usually quiet weequay electronics expert stood up, and shuffled over, he had slides prepared because he barely if ever spoke more than single syllable words.

The Slide Read.

Bus and Data stream Scrambling:

The Order of the Data stream and bus is set to be scrambled to make it much harder to merely observe the circuits signals being sent without trying to gain direct access, so simply watching something either through the force, or via an xray device able to pick up electronics would be impossible without physically connecting to the circuit, as there was no logic or order to the scrambling routine, which varied and was made up on the fly.

Frequency sensors tracked UV and other imaging techniques, that would block semi-invasing copying techniques by simply reflecting them back, and more the metals they were building this out of were planned to be sensor dampening, making scanning the circuit board itself troublesome from a distance without physically tampering with it, which brought its own hazards.

BURP

Someone added loudly in the background breaking the unusual silence, and everyone looked around…. a fat houk shrugged, and the presentation continued.

 

[Sere Reene]

Not to be out done, none-fire had an ace up his sleeve himself, two more slides came up ahead of him.

Junk Data

As well as the senors set around the circuits, and the scrambler on the bus, junk data to be filtered out was also added, if it was not filtered out the inbuilt program on the chip was set to fry the equipment. These false packets would only happen intermittently, and had three fall-back checks to make sure the signal was processed even in times of extreme stress on the CPU cores, but nevertheless spotting the junk data unless you are physically connected to the chip would be all but impossible, and even knowing it was junk data in the first place would make reverse engineering the software fraught with pitfalls, because how would anyone but the original programmers know until they experienced it?

Chip Modification

In the case of somehow the previous defences failing and the base chip itself being modified, the number of circuits on each chip was set to a fixed degree, and an internal check sent on a regular basis with inbuilt sensors, to make sure they were not breached or tampered with. They could have done this with a timing system, but that might make the design too fragile to accidental failure. If the chip itself was physically modified, which would require some reverse engineering, then the circuit would fry. The only logical way around this particularly nasty redundancy within the tamper system would be a raid on FFE themselves to steal a prototype base chip and to work on it from scratch.

 

[Sere Reene]

Finding a cost effective but sensor blocking material was proving problematic for those designing the chip, it obviously couldn’t be conductive in the main bulk of circuit, light, it also needed to be cheap enough to add as these chips were going to built and sold on mass with FFE’s optional components, sometimes two or more to a weapon.

A lull in affairs saw the leading team arranging a drinking game while they awaited word from the metallurgists and chem techs who were putting their heads together, the drinking game involved spinning bullet casings across a table between two bottles. It was receiving as much attention as the design did because pride was on the line, insinuations some of the techs were too drunk had been met with challenges and thus bullet spinning was the order of the day. Sere idly hoped nobody was using live ammo…

A possible compromise was reached with the metal and chip specialists, though they were keeping their mix of alloys under wraps for now, and only showed it to Sere privately on a data pad, which she silently approved with a swish of her tail. You never could tell whose eyes were wandering around your factory, in fact much of the chips design was being locked down and compartmentalised as it was worked on. So that each individual member of the team was now responsible for their own work, with just two or three knowing more than that, just two or three expendable techs Sere had made note of…

All in all quite clever, because nobody, only her, would know the final completed design.

 

[Sere Reene]

Bringing it all together now, the casing of the individual products, which in many cases could be standardized components slots, of fixed sized and dimensions, so it was relatively easy to reinforce a standard design, not only making it stronger but also harder to physically get into. They doubled this on the circuit boards themselves, with rudimentary tamper switches so that if the circuit board was exposed it would short out. The downside to this was that damage to the component would mean it could fail quicker, so the light sensors had to be sure that it wasn’t just a breach in the casing which was proving troublesome to get right.

“Is that… on?”

Sere sat, her tail swishing side to side, pawing at the designs, when she started to smell smoke, a unit caught fire and someone face palmed, didn’t seem their attempt at adding temperature sensing was working well, not with the flames and all.

“Yes…yes that’s fire.” Sere added calmly, watching one of the prototypes burn, Sluissi were so calm even when a good few hours work was burning away ahead of them. "We should probably put it out."

"You think???"

A carbonite hosing later, and a large white blob in the middle of the testing station, they were on with the show, hoping that the backup unit fared better!

 

[Sere Reene]

Temperature control was definitely a bust, using the materials they were at least, it simply proved too expensive to put into the final design. No matter, arduously they worked, tirelessly continuing on the backup prototype, getting back the work they had lost cost them another days development. Then a week of preproduction, fine tuning the design and working out all the technical hurdles involved in putting this many counter measures into one circuit. They spent that week on making it as cost-effective as possible, sourcing supplies of cheaper parts, repair contracts, or labor, but even so it was going to cost credits, there was no doubt it’d add a good 5,000 to the base price of any component, times the number of modular components they wanted shielding.

Sere was content with the cost and signed off on it with her technical director, it was too valuable not to, and with that in hand she considered the project done. This project allowed tamper resistance, on top of the regular tamper resistance that would be designed into every FFE product from here on out.

The team celebrated with a few hundred bottles of liquor, leaving them a good few thousand short of how many they’d usually consume, and that perhaps worried the techs more, the last thing they wanted to be thought of was respectable, they had a reputation to uphold, and so began the celebrations in earnest!