4 ms·

How is the backdoor situation when you license ARM and implement it yourself on an FPGA? I'm assuming there are big sections that are still black boxes you just

How is the backdoor situation when you license ARM and implement it yourself on an FPGA? I'm assuming there are big sections that are still black boxes you just paste in, but I would think that would still help contain the potential exploitation vectors a lot— like, if you were willing to design the ethernet peripheral/stack yourself, you immediately eliminate a lot of unknowns.

godelmachine 8y ago
FPGA’s consume heck lotta power. Totally not Indian.
PorterDuff 8y ago
That's a good question. I've worked on a couple of products with those and never thought about it. It seems to me that the interesting angle to this would be to avoid manufacture and instead spend your time on radical CPU designs on FPGA to be made from scratch later. No doubt that doesn't meet the needs of the folks in India.
petra 8y ago
Long ago i remember briefly reading some research articles about FPGA vulnerabilities. Don't know if it's practical, but people designing critical system are justifiably paranoid.
- penagwin 8y ago
  The ultimate security perspective is to assume that you're defending against an unlimited resource nation-state that's specifically targetting you. Obviously, there is no such thing as "complete security" but you can try to secure what you can, that's why people concern themselves with what may seem like unlikely revenues of attack. I mean depending on how critical your system is, it can really change how you operate. Get a virus on your computer? Some people use anti-virus, and when that says it "removed the virus" they're happy. Other people would only be happy with a complete OS reinstall from a fresh ISO made on a different machine as acceptable. Still other's would require new hardware, it's possible (and has been seen in the wild) to reflash the ROM of the motherboard, or potentially many other low-level chips through software, and to persist the virus through that. Likely no, just depends.

godelmachine 8y ago

FPGA’s consume heck lotta power. Totally not Indian.

PorterDuff 8y ago

That's a good question. I've worked on a couple of products with those and never thought about it. It seems to me that the interesting angle to this would be to avoid manufacture and instead spend your time on radical CPU designs on FPGA to be made from scratch later. No doubt that doesn't meet the needs of the folks in India.

petra 8y ago

Long ago i remember briefly reading some research articles about FPGA vulnerabilities. Don't know if it's practical, but people designing critical system are justifiably paranoid.

penagwin 8y ago
The ultimate security perspective is to assume that you're defending against an unlimited resource nation-state that's specifically targetting you. Obviously, there is no such thing as "complete security" but you can try to secure what you can, that's why people concern themselves with what may seem like unlikely revenues of attack. I mean depending on how critical your system is, it can really change how you operate. Get a virus on your computer? Some people use anti-virus, and when that says it "removed the virus" they're happy. Other people would only be happy with a complete OS reinstall from a fresh ISO made on a different machine as acceptable. Still other's would require new hardware, it's possible (and has been seen in the wild) to reflash the ROM of the motherboard, or potentially many other low-level chips through software, and to persist the virus through that. Likely no, just depends.