5 ms·

Fat pointers, capabilities, something like that seem feasible https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security

by snaky 8y ago

Fat pointers, capabilities, something like that seem feasible https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/. The problem is all that is nice and cool, but the real world IoT is about Chinese cams by Dahua of MIRAI fame and ESP32 modules with barely working WPA. Because the price is low, and that's what matters at scale.

pjmlp 8y ago
I am fully aware that cheap always trumps quality, until we get a couple of big lawsuits that finally force governments to put some regulation in place.
- snaky 8y ago
  I hope there's another route, because we all know perfectly well what the strengthening of power leads to. What if perfectly secure, formally proved and verified code would be simultaneously the cheapest to produce, considering developers time, code performance and other business metrics? What if the guy in Shenzhen would download not the bunch of C libraries from Github and hack it until it don't crash for at least 5 minutes on the new version of the SoC, but download instead a Coq code, proved by best and brightest Stanford researchers, and just tweak the hardware spec a little - then generate the fastest possible assembly code from it, with test, quick and automagically? What if another guy in Shenzhen, who need to hack a bunch of IPs to build that SoC as fast as possible, and tape it out before other guys, would do the same to generate the RTL - not because it's cool or right, or anything - but because it's faster and cheaper than hacking Verilog and write all the test scripts to verify the SoC don't hang up too often. Maybe we need a dozen of projects like https://deepspec.org https://deepspec.org for make it happen, but I think there's no another way to really change the state of affairs.

5 ms·

Fat pointers, capabilities, something like that seem feasible https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security

by snaky 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago
I am fully aware that cheap always trumps quality, until we get a couple of big lawsuits that finally force governments to put some regulation in place.
- snaky 8y ago
  I hope there's another route, because we all know perfectly well what the strengthening of power leads to. What if perfectly secure, formally proved and verified code would be simultaneously the cheapest to produce, considering developers time, code performance and other business metrics? What if the guy in Shenzhen would download not the bunch of C libraries from Github and hack it until it don't crash for at least 5 minutes on the new version of the SoC, but download instead a Coq code, proved by best and brightest Stanford researchers, and just tweak the hardware spec a little - then generate the fastest possible assembly code from it, with test, quick and automagically? What if another guy in Shenzhen, who need to hack a bunch of IPs to build that SoC as fast as possible, and tape it out before other guys, would do the same to generate the RTL - not because it's cool or right, or anything - but because it's faster and cheaper than hacking Verilog and write all the test scripts to verify the SoC don't hang up too often. Maybe we need a dozen of projects like https://deepspec.org https://deepspec.org for make it happen, but I think there's no another way to really change the state of affairs.