3 ms·

Can someone explain what this is or what it is competing against?

by throwawaysea 7y ago

otabdeveloper4 7y ago
It's way for big software and/or hardware companies to block you from running your own Linux distribution of choice. (I'm exaggerating, but only very slightly, by a nanometer.)
- comex 7y ago
  OpenTitan seems to be mainly oriented towards servers, though the announcement post [1] does mention that it could also be used for client devices. [1] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourcing-transparent.html https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourc...
- phkahler 7y ago
  Exactly. The bottom line is hardware that will only run trusted software. The problem then becomes determining who gets to sign software. Better would be to just have a physical switch to disable firmware writes.
shakna 7y ago
> Silicon RoT can help ensure that the hardware infrastructure and the software that runs on it remain in their intended, trustworthy state by verifying that the critical system components boot securely using authorized and verifiable code. The idea is that the firmware can't be modified without causing errors to propagate, errors that may not be able to be bypassed. It can do some good things like protecting encryption keys, but mostly it allows someone to verify their server is exactly as they intended. Preventing a few high impact hijacking techniques that are incredibly difficult to pull off. However, similar things have crept into consumer-grade hardware, where it's used to prevent someone from using a device for how _the owner_ intends, which is not so good. --- This thing isn't really competing with many. It's an open-sourcing of Google's Titan [0], in an area which is fairly new. It's an attempt to own the niche. [0] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourcing-transparent.html https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourc...

3 ms·

Can someone explain what this is or what it is competing against?

by throwawaysea 7y ago

Can someone explain what this is or what it is competing against?

otabdeveloper4 7y ago
It's way for big software and/or hardware companies to block you from running your own Linux distribution of choice. (I'm exaggerating, but only very slightly, by a nanometer.)
- comex 7y ago
  OpenTitan seems to be mainly oriented towards servers, though the announcement post [1] does mention that it could also be used for client devices. [1] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourcing-transparent.html https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourc...
- phkahler 7y ago
  Exactly. The bottom line is hardware that will only run trusted software. The problem then becomes determining who gets to sign software. Better would be to just have a physical switch to disable firmware writes.
shakna 7y ago
> Silicon RoT can help ensure that the hardware infrastructure and the software that runs on it remain in their intended, trustworthy state by verifying that the critical system components boot securely using authorized and verifiable code. The idea is that the firmware can't be modified without causing errors to propagate, errors that may not be able to be bypassed. It can do some good things like protecting encryption keys, but mostly it allows someone to verify their server is exactly as they intended. Preventing a few high impact hijacking techniques that are incredibly difficult to pull off. However, similar things have crept into consumer-grade hardware, where it's used to prevent someone from using a device for how _the owner_ intends, which is not so good. --- This thing isn't really competing with many. It's an open-sourcing of Google's Titan [0], in an area which is fairly new. It's an attempt to own the niche. [0] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourcing-transparent.html https://security.googleblog.com/2019/11/opentitan-open-sourc...