[Arm-netbook] bunnie about riscv

[ronwirring at Safe-mail.net]

From: Neil Jansen <njansen1 at gmail.com>


> On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 4:38 PM, <ronwirring at safe-mail.net> wrote:
> > Thank you for the information.
> > I have watched a rutkowska video on how complicated
> > intel's management features are.
> > Difficult.
> 
> That's why I'm here, lol.  The Intel stuff is getting bad enough that it
> has me wondering what I can do for the open source hardware world.  Moving
> to ARM via EOMA68 is a good near-term solution, but even that's not going
> to be 100% trustable at lest by bunnie's standards in the lecture.
> Something like RISC-V has the potential to get there, but as he pointed
> out, even that's not completely open.  I think right now the important
> thing is to just be an early adopter of this stuff to show that the
> market's there.  bunnie broke the demographics down pretty well, there's
> definitely money to be made.  Back to Intel though.  It makes me want to
> jump on eBay and pick up some older vintage Intel CPU's that didn't have
> the management features, but obviously there's no way to know if those
> aren't blown wide open by other means.  Man, very interesting times we live
> in.
> 
> 
> > Remarkable that you cannot do a verification using a microscope.
> 
> You can do exactly this, and it'll get you to maybe 99% of the way there.
> Companies like ChipWorks do exactly this for money.  Others do it for hobby
> (see: http://www.visual6502.org/, http://siliconpr0n.org/,
> https://zeptobars.com/en/, http://www.righto.com/).  It can often get great
> results.  bunnie was playing devils advocate by saying even if you did
> this, there are still things that can be present but in an obfuscated
> manner, that could be malicious or careless.  This doesn't really mean to
> throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Having a reverse engineered CPU
> with a small possibility of shenanigans is still better than having a 100%
> proprietary CPU or a 50% proprietary CPU.  Security through obscurity and
> all that.
> 
> 
> > We should have libre software hdds and ram.
> 
> Can you elaborate on that a bit?  I don't understand what you mean.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/16/8048243/nsa-hard-drive-firmware-virus-stuxnet




Devices like hdd, ram, sd card have their own system software.
You cannot access it and do not know what it can do.
https://opencores.org/



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