3 ms·

The question then, really, is how far are you willing to go down the stack of software on hardware, in pursuit of true ideological purity? How can, even the Pin

The question then, really, is how far are you willing to go down the stack of software on hardware, in pursuit of true ideological purity? How can, even the Pinephone manufacturers, be absolutely sure that their design is being implemented in hardware as they specced it, without backdoors? If you have a near infinite amount of money and resources, you can be absolutely certain (the hardware that runs NSA approved type 1 crypto goes through a very thorough vetting process), but such a concept is economically unrealistic for anything that normal people can buy.

ratorx 6y ago
Hardware level trust would be really cool. It seems theoretically possible because all you need is an accurate measurement of some physical property that is hard to forge when changing transistors orders etc. Practically though, anything like that would be most likely affected by manufacturing tolerances for the transistors, so you’d have to find something that allows a certain amount of error when individual transistors change, but will reveal unknown transistors and connections. Even if this was achieved, the rabbithole would continue though, because the thing you measure with could now have a backdoor. Remind me of the classic paper about the same problem with software: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- walrus01 6y ago
  As the paper points out, ultimately you have to trust the people. This is why vetting processes exist for access to some critical things. And why I have a fairly high degree of confidence that certain reputable people can be relied upon to take a firm stand on principles and ideology (example: if somebody was trying to pressure Moxie Marlinspike to backdoor Signal).

3 ms·

The question then, really, is how far are you willing to go down the stack of software on hardware, in pursuit of true ideological purity? How can, even the Pin

by walrus01 6y ago

ratorx 6y ago
Hardware level trust would be really cool. It seems theoretically possible because all you need is an accurate measurement of some physical property that is hard to forge when changing transistors orders etc. Practically though, anything like that would be most likely affected by manufacturing tolerances for the transistors, so you’d have to find something that allows a certain amount of error when individual transistors change, but will reveal unknown transistors and connections. Even if this was achieved, the rabbithole would continue though, because the thing you measure with could now have a backdoor. Remind me of the classic paper about the same problem with software: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- walrus01 6y ago
  As the paper points out, ultimately you have to trust the people. This is why vetting processes exist for access to some critical things. And why I have a fairly high degree of confidence that certain reputable people can be relied upon to take a firm stand on principles and ideology (example: if somebody was trying to pressure Moxie Marlinspike to backdoor Signal).