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There are two avenues: 1. Take an Intel or AMD system and try to secure-ify it. This is what vendors like system76[1] and Purism[2] do, especially aided by the
by bo1024 8y ago
There are two avenues:
1. Take an Intel or AMD system and try to secure-ify it. This is what vendors like system76[1] and Purism[2] do, especially aided by the coreboot project[3]. I'm not an expert on the details, but an important goal in this space has been disabling Intel ME[4], which I note in the original parent article seems to be part of this exploit (at least when used remotely). AMD has a corresponding parasite cpu-in-cpu, not sure about progress on disabling.
2. Use another CPU. Someone else mentioned the raptor project, that's all I know of (but again I'm not an expert). But by far the most common consumer CPU that competes with Intel and AMD, who make x86 processors, is the ARM platform used by phones, Raspberry Pis, and many embedded devices.
Note the CPU is only one kind of closed firmware that can have backdoors or insecurities....
[1] https://system76.com/ https://system76.com/
[2] https://puri.sm/ https://puri.sm/
[3] https://www.coreboot.org/ https://www.coreboot.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
- wuschel 8y agoHi, thanks for the links Indeed, the control and understanding of the CPU (and auxiliary chips) is key. A naive question: what are the resources needed to get your own CPU architecture going, not necessarily state of the art, but older technology? The fabrication technology is there, after all. And many a patent should be expired by now. Also, there must be some academic projects out there which build such complex systems.
- dbdjfjrjvebd 8y agoI don't know much about this but I guess you could check out RISC V
- djsumdog 8y agoWith Intel/AMD x86_64 chips, you have a platform to go with it: the PC architecture. The BIOS/UEFI in this architecture is incredibly standard over the course of their offerings. The PlayStation 4 has an x86 chip, but is not a PC. It cannot boot a mainline kernel because a lot of basic assumptions about how a PC works don't exist on the PS4 platform. The Fail0ver people have done some great talks at all the issues porting Linux to the PS4. The trouble with ARM is that it's not an architecture. Linux got so popular among developers and nerds in the 90s because you could just install it on any PC that was out there. When people got hardware working, they could upstream their changes. Phone manufactures patch the hell out of their kernels in terrible ways that can never be up-streamed, and include tons of binary blobs and shims. PostmarketOS is making some progress here, but it's slow. ARM phones don't have a standard BIOS. (with the exception of the Windows Mobile line, which has ARM+UEFI, yet Microsoft still won't release a bootloader unlock even though their phone is pretty much dead at this point). Some ARM devices use the devicetree standard for hardware identification/allocation, but it's still a mess. I wrote about this before: https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
- bo1024 8y agoThanks, the info and post is helpful!