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The problem is the AMD PSB functionality in itself. It should be considered malware like the Intel managament engine and thus refused by users. It's a second pr

The problem is the AMD PSB functionality in itself. It should be considered malware like the Intel managament engine and thus refused by users. It's a second processor that runs a proprietary firmware signed by the vendor (that the user cannot modify or substitute entirely with a FLOSS alternative) that vendors can use do harm to the user. The AMD PSB can also be used to lock down a processor to enforce secure boot and thus don't let you run an unsigned operating system, i.e. no longer allowing you to run Linux on your machine that comes out of the factory with Windows preinstalled. That would be a very very bad thing. Unfortunately both for Intel and AMD you don't have choices these days. I'm hoping someone develops a processor based on the RISCV architecture (a free architecture that doesn't include that shit) to be used in a computer entirely under the control of the user (hardware and software) and not the corporation that makes it.

judge2020 5y ago
> RISCV architecture (a free architecture that doesn't include that shit) Surely you can't think the architecture itself is the differentiator. x86 didn't have all of this security 20 years ago, give engineers a few years of time to throw some locks on a risc-v chip and it'll be Enterprise Ready™ in no time.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  The good news is the main manufacturers of RISC-V are Chinese vendors that allow complete access to low level processor details. They generally don't lock down their products at all.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Bad news is that US doesn't want to have anything with them.
    - orangepurple 5y ago
      You can still import them into the US en masse
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Still, until the government plays an Huawei move.
      - avianes 5y ago
        Not if they break US patents (which is likely), or if the US puts more constraints on imports.
    - voakbasda 5y ago
      At this point, their government has completely undermined foreign confidence in their semiconductor industry. I would be careful to avoid any processors from there, because the chance that it contains a backdoor is just too great to risk. Even if that is only a perceived risk and not a real one. American propaganda in recent years clearly set out to reach this new status quo, and it’s probably all smoke and little to no fire. But it worked. There are enough examples of China screwing over foreign companies to prove the risk could be real no matter your size (e.g. ARM China).
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        That applies to every foreign country actually. Anyone that wants to be 100% sure of the supply chain has to move away from globalization.
        hilbert42 5y ago
        Exactly! Exactly! Exactly! I still cannot understand why the US and other countries with high tech allowed themselves to become so absolutely dependent on China. When their own companies killed of local manufacturing and went to China out of greed and increased profits then governments should have stepped in on strategic grounds, so why didn't they? It was obvious to me some 25 years ago and I've no monopoly on this insight so they must have been well aware that this would happen. In essence, these countries have been shooting themselves in the feet for decades. The question is why. Edit: I can remember the time when the US military required certain components, chips etc. to be able to be second-sourced from multiple manufacturers before they were incorporated into equipment. Does anyone else remember this? Clearly governments, not only the US, have been aware of the problem for many decades and have chosen to do nothing about it. Moreover, what brought them to abandon this once good policy in the first instance?
      - throw58765434 5y ago
- userbinator 5y ago
  With the (already?) expiration of x86 patents, I'd love to see a "pure" x86 implementation without any of the user-hostile crap, and see how far the community can take it; but sadly, the RISC bandwagon is diverting attention away from that. A CPU without the user-hostile features but still able to run the massive existing software base would be ideal.
  - alerighi 5y ago
    Would be too difficult to implement. x86 is a very big instruction that is impossible to implement with an hardware: both Intel and AMD processors in fact run inside a virtual machine that translates x86 instructions in an internal RISC instruction set that is manageable by the real CPU architecture. If Apple decided to move away from x86 and go to ARM to have their processor, and we are talking about one of the biggest companies, I don't think any community project will ever succeed in doing another x86 compatible CPU. On the other side RISCV instruction set is far simpler, being a RISC instruction set it decides to not have advanced optimizations in the processor (even better, none at all) and leave the optimization work to the compiler, that not only simplifies the processor, but also reduces the surface of attack of the processor (Meltown, Spectre, and all these attacks are just impossible on RISCV!). Of course that has a performance penalty, but since you simplify the processor you can just put more core in the saved space right?
    - userbinator 5y ago
      I'm not sure if you're being satirical, but open source x86 cores do exist --- they're around a 486 in terms of compatibility. Look up ao486 for example. What I'm referring to is the expiration of patents from the P6 era, which would mean all the uop-based stuff is now free to implement. What a lot of the RISC hype doesn't understand is the huge value in backwards compatibility --- you can have your "100% free" world but it'll forever remain niche. We need to accommodate the proprietary world if we want any chance of freedom winning; and not try to divide the world of computing.
      - coldtea 5y ago
- alerighi 5y ago
  RISCV is an open architecture. If a manufacturer does that, simply don't buy the processor from that manufacturer and buy it from another. All your software will still be compatible since it's the same architecture. Otherwise with x86 is more complex: you can choose between Intel and AMD (that has bought the license for the x86 instruction set - not something cheap to get), and both of them had their backdoor processor inside the computer (at least on Intel there are ways to disable it, as far as I know with AMD is more difficult if not impossible to do).
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Assuming that the software is all available from source and can be recompiled. Only the base RISC V is guaranteed thanks extensions. Also you are forgetting that just like Android and ARM, there are other forces at play that don't make it as easy in practice as FOSS advocates wish for.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > Assuming that the software is all available from source and can be recompiled. I remembered hearing that same line when I bought a Raspberry Pi in 2012. "It's useless! You can't run x86 software on it, so what's the point?" Flash-forwards a decade and now Graviton instances are blowing up like nothing else in the industry. RISC-V is in a very similar position to ARM 10 years ago; the groundwork has been laid, standards have been ratified and base packages/several kernels work perfectly fine on it. The only difference is that ARM is more expensive to license and is less flexible. > Only the base RISC V is guaranteed thanks extensions. Yeah. Is that a problem? The situation on ARM is equally bad if not worse (frequent iterations end up throwing even relatively recent CPU models under the bus), and the reason why RISC-V divided itself into extensions is so that you didn't have to start from scratch when John RISC decides to add in 3 new floating point instructions. It's a pretty damn good compromise if you ask me, and it certainly doesn't have any bearing on software availability; RISC-V programs run on RISC-V processors. ARM does not have that same liberty. There are plenty of genuine constraints for RISC-V (the majority of them in the manufacturing/mass production side of things, now), but the majority of these software issues have been solved and taped out years ago.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
Well its only a question of time before someone starts targeting the Intel vPro Management Engine and AMD PSB to alter CPU abilities using variations of code like that found on Github below. https://github.com/mostav02/Remove_IntelME_FPT https://github.com/mostav02/Remove_IntelME_FPT https://github.com/rootkovska/x86_harmful/blob/master/x86_harmful.md https://github.com/rootkovska/x86_harmful/blob/master/x86_ha... https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/blob/master/me_cleaner.py https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/blob/master/me_cleaner.p...
- sedatk 5y ago
  These would only help the power users, not the remaining 99%.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    Trusted computing environments only hurt 1% of the users anyways. We live in a world where people talk about Thinkpads vs Macbook Pros, but for 99% of the world laptops are appliances they buy like we'd buy a toaster. They don't care that they can't run Linux, if anything onerous code signing requirements ala mobile devices would be great for the safety of their devices with minimal effects on what they can do. - I'm not saying I want the market for power users to die, I'm one of them after all, but I also feel like these conversations on HN are often disconnected from the reality most people live in... This isn't really a "they don't know better so they don't complain", this is a "even if they knew better they wouldn't complain"
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      The hypothetical homogeneous group 'they' you refer to doesn't exist. It's billions of people and 'they' feel many ways. By painting with a common brush, you shut down discussions of what could be and encourage fence sitters to give up. Let's talk about why it's possible, easy to do, and how to do it. The more fence sitters you convince that things are possible, pushes the fence further and further towards the other side.
kube-system 5y ago
> It should be considered malware like the Intel managament engine and thus refused by users. Well, that clearly didn’t happen with ME. Intel’s market share gradually grew for the decade after ME was introduced.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Also it's not like there aren't legitimate uses for it. My workplace started taking advantage of it to help with remote management of all of our machines. It's useful to have another way in that doesn't rely on the OS being in a good state or even for the machine to be fully powered on.
Retr0id 5y ago
> a free architecture that doesn't include that shit There is nothing stopping RISC-V SoC/CPU vendors from tacking it on.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  You're not wrong, but what's the motivation? With x86, backdoors and coprocessors were able to be added because both AMD and Intel were pretty much the only players in the ISA. Since they were effectively the only license-holders (and American multinational companies at that), the government had no problem forcing them to both add IME/PSP. With RISC-V, there is pretty much no such obligation. It's an open spec, there is no licensing fee and there isn't an obligation to add hardware susceptibilities. Chinese companies will (and are) manufacture chips like this at the lowest cost possible, likely eschewing any black-box m53s running Minix that you'd find on an American CPU. It also opens the possibility for more bespoke chip designs (as it's a modular ISA), and hopefully dividing the market between security-conscious products and consumer ones will stop all devices from being digitally wiretapped. It's all speculation right now, but it's highly unlikely that RISC-V will be pozzed in the same way x86 or even modern ARM clusters are. There's too much competition, too much money to be made, and too few incentives. Suffice to say, you're probably going to hear the three-letter agencies complaining about "unsafe Chinese chips" soon or something equally stupid.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    > ...the government had no problem forcing them to both add IME/PSP. This is a false narrative, these management engines were added because large (corporate) customers of the major CPU vendors asked for them. Enterprise IT shops love stuff like this, anything to help them tame the unruly beast of asset inventory and management. This is the same reason things like iLO and DRAC exist, and they have all of the same types of bugs for the same core reason. Not only does the government not want management engines, the ability to turn them off using HAP is courtesy of the US government (namely the NSA!) asking for a feature to disable it. The main problem here is that the truth is boring, and the conspiracy theory sounds much more interesting. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-now-you-too-can-disable-intel-me-backdoor-thanks-to-the-nsa.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no...
mnd999 5y ago
Raptor CS are still making those Power9 workstations I think. Power9 is also a free architecture “without that shit”.
spamizbad 5y ago
RISC-V permits vendor extensions so absolutely nothing is stopping a vendor from creating PSB-like functionality in a RISC-V chip. RISC-V is just an ISA.
- thrtythreeforty 5y ago
  I mean for that matter you can have a RISC-V core with an open source boot ROM that refuses to boot anything but Windows (pretend for a moment they deign to do a RISC-V build).
LeoPanthera 5y ago
> no longer allowing you to run Linux Is this actually true? openSUSE is supplied with a shim bootloader apparently signed with Microsoft's keys, allowing the OS to boot on any machine with Secure Boot enabled.
- mjg59 5y ago
  Windows is signed with different keys to all other third party UEFI code, so in theory you could ship a system that trusted Windows but not anything else. "Anything else" would include the option ROMs on GPUs, so you'd never be able to plug in a new Nvidia, but if that's a price you're willing to pay you could definitely block Linux today.
Dma54rhs 5y ago
It won't be considered malware because techbros have embraced Apples closed down systems and Microsoft and every other player is just getting up to date. This ship has sailed long time ago.
mjg59 5y ago
You're conflating two different things - AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) and Platform Secure Boot (PSB). PSP is broadly equivalent to Intel's ME, but lives on the CPU package rather than in the chipset. PSB is equivalent to Intel's Boot Guard, a feature that verifies that the system firmware has a valid signature before letting the CPU boot it. Both Boot Guard and PSB prevent you from modifying the system firmware (and, say, putting Coreboot on there), but because Boot Guard is implemented in the ME, and because the ME is in the chipset, not the CPU, you can take CPUs out of Intel-based systems and transfer them to somewhere else. If you do the same with a PSB-fused AMD, the firmware on the new board won't be signed with the same key and it'll refuse to boot. None of this technology provides any real way to prevent you from booting Linux. If vendors wanted to do that, they could already just ship firmware that only supported the Windows signing key and didn't let users enroll new keys. They don't need PSP, ME, Boot Guard or PSB to do that.
- alerighi 5y ago
  You said it: it prevents you from booting a custom firmware. If the manufacturer decides to lock down the stock firmware for only booting Windows (something that is not absurd and some manufacturers already attempted in the past, and keep in mind that Microsoft is requiring TPM and secure boot with Windows 11) you are basically screwed. You can't boot Linux with the stock firmware and you can't change the system firmware. And given that is firmware, it's worse than that: the manufacturer can with a firmware update remove (that you can't downgrade thanks to all this security bullshit) the possibility to disable secure boot and revoke the keys used by Linux distributions. Reason why I tend to never update the firmware of computers (as to me the firmware is just a bootloader to GRUB that then boots the operating system). The real thing is, we don't need this kind of security. We don't need ME, PSP, PSB, TPM, and all kind of bullshit. I've never herd of an attack in real life that exploits the boot process. When 99% of computers runs Windows that is full of security vulnerabilities, and nearly half of them even a no longer supported version of Windows, the other half a non updated version because updates are a waste of time.
  - mjg59 5y ago
    A computer that requires the firmware to be replaced to boot Linux is already at the point where 99% of users are just not going to install Linux (I've personally ported Coreboot to two of my laptops, and even I would never buy hardware that required me to do that before I could run Linux). And, well, you may well have never heard of attacks that would be mitigated by these technologies, but I have. Firmware-based attacks have existed for over a decade, and the Hacking Team leak included a firmware implant targeted at some ThinkPads. Do I think most users need to worry about this? No, I don't, and I don't know that there's enough people who do need to worry about this that it should be the default (I have thoughts on this, I'll write them up later this evening). But to deny that some people do need to worry about this is just inaccurate. And Microsoft has required secure boot and TPMs on all certified client systems since Windows 8.1. Almost all shipped hardware already has all this functionality. If Microsoft had any interest in being evil here, they've had the opportunity to do so for years. Anyway! Even if you can't replace the firmware, the secure boot database is in an unprotected variable store, so you can just replace it even if PSB is enabled. You're welcome.
charcircuit 5y ago
>malware like the Intel managament engine The code is not malicious please do not call it malware. Your computer already has dozens of other chips running proprietary software on them. It's just a normal part of PC components except since a CPU doesn't have a board the chip is built right in.
- neatze 5y ago
  Seems like you are not aware of Intel ME past vulnerabilities.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    That would imply that basically every single piece of software ever made is malware.
    - neatze 5y ago
      Not sure about every single piece of software, but what do you call closed source relatively hidden software in hardware that grants you full access with empty password, running on unaccountable number of computers for many years ?
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    The only major one required an attacker to open your machine and attach a flasher. Usually it's considered game over if an attacker has physical access to your machine.
throwaway81523 5y ago
> Unfortunately both for Intel and AMD you don't have choices these days. I'm hoping someone develops a processor based on the RISCV architecture (a free architecture that doesn't include that shit) to be used in a computer entirely under the control of the user (hardware and software) and not the corporation that makes it. That exists for the POWER architecture, but unfortunately those cpus are way behind x86 in speed and efficency, at least so far. I expect RISCV will be the same way for quite some time. Maybe someday...
samstave 5y ago
>>It's a second processor that runs a proprietary firmware signed by the vendor (that the user cannot modify or substitute entirely with a FLOSS alternative) that vendors can use do harm to the user. This is EXACTLY what all the major handsets/cellphones have had in them for a very long time. Carriers required certain side/backdoors into the devices.. which was really a tunnel for LEO/State...
matheusmoreira 5y ago
We'll never be truly free until we can make our computers at home just like we can make our own software.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I find it funny, how software, bugs, and possibly malicious intents are considered way differently than the same thing in practically any other industry. You buy a Toyota, they screw up the floormats, causing a potentially dangerous situation, millions of cars recalled, issue fixed. Volkswagen knows about an intentional 'screwup' (the exhaust cheating), they get caught, class actions, people return cars, get monetary compensation, etc. You buy an Intel, after Intel knows about a screwup... whoops... here's a software fix that cripples your cpus performance. Whoops, didnt fix everything, disable hyperthreading. Money back? Nope. Any other kind of compensation? Nope. Same with software.. they put an EULA there, and they're somehow not responsible for anything anymore. Here, you might lose a functionality that made you buy that computer in the first place, and "whoops".
- saxonww 5y ago
  The key differences are probably the "dangerous situation" and the "class action". Probably no one is going to die if they can't resell their CPU or install Linux on their laptop. And regardless, for a class action suit there'd have to be a class, and as usual the vast majority of people buying Lenovo are not aware of this, wouldn't care if they did, or actually consider it a feature; this article is about some Lenovo machines that I think are sold primarily to businesses who would probably like it if the machine couldn't have end users overwrite the OS or fiddle with the hardware.

judge2020 5y ago

> RISCV architecture (a free architecture that doesn't include that shit) Surely you can't think the architecture itself is the differentiator. x86 didn't have all of this security 20 years ago, give engineers a few years of time to throw some locks on a risc-v chip and it'll be Enterprise Ready™ in no time.

orangepurple 5y ago
The good news is the main manufacturers of RISC-V are Chinese vendors that allow complete access to low level processor details. They generally don't lock down their products at all.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Bad news is that US doesn't want to have anything with them.
  - orangepurple 5y ago
    You can still import them into the US en masse
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Still, until the government plays an Huawei move.
    - avianes 5y ago
      Not if they break US patents (which is likely), or if the US puts more constraints on imports.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    At this point, their government has completely undermined foreign confidence in their semiconductor industry. I would be careful to avoid any processors from there, because the chance that it contains a backdoor is just too great to risk. Even if that is only a perceived risk and not a real one. American propaganda in recent years clearly set out to reach this new status quo, and it’s probably all smoke and little to no fire. But it worked. There are enough examples of China screwing over foreign companies to prove the risk could be real no matter your size (e.g. ARM China).
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      That applies to every foreign country actually. Anyone that wants to be 100% sure of the supply chain has to move away from globalization.
      - hilbert42 5y ago
        Exactly! Exactly! Exactly! I still cannot understand why the US and other countries with high tech allowed themselves to become so absolutely dependent on China. When their own companies killed of local manufacturing and went to China out of greed and increased profits then governments should have stepped in on strategic grounds, so why didn't they? It was obvious to me some 25 years ago and I've no monopoly on this insight so they must have been well aware that this would happen. In essence, these countries have been shooting themselves in the feet for decades. The question is why. Edit: I can remember the time when the US military required certain components, chips etc. to be able to be second-sourced from multiple manufacturers before they were incorporated into equipment. Does anyone else remember this? Clearly governments, not only the US, have been aware of the problem for many decades and have chosen to do nothing about it. Moreover, what brought them to abandon this once good policy in the first instance?
    - throw58765434 5y ago
userbinator 5y ago
With the (already?) expiration of x86 patents, I'd love to see a "pure" x86 implementation without any of the user-hostile crap, and see how far the community can take it; but sadly, the RISC bandwagon is diverting attention away from that. A CPU without the user-hostile features but still able to run the massive existing software base would be ideal.
- alerighi 5y ago
  Would be too difficult to implement. x86 is a very big instruction that is impossible to implement with an hardware: both Intel and AMD processors in fact run inside a virtual machine that translates x86 instructions in an internal RISC instruction set that is manageable by the real CPU architecture. If Apple decided to move away from x86 and go to ARM to have their processor, and we are talking about one of the biggest companies, I don't think any community project will ever succeed in doing another x86 compatible CPU. On the other side RISCV instruction set is far simpler, being a RISC instruction set it decides to not have advanced optimizations in the processor (even better, none at all) and leave the optimization work to the compiler, that not only simplifies the processor, but also reduces the surface of attack of the processor (Meltown, Spectre, and all these attacks are just impossible on RISCV!). Of course that has a performance penalty, but since you simplify the processor you can just put more core in the saved space right?
  - userbinator 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you're being satirical, but open source x86 cores do exist --- they're around a 486 in terms of compatibility. Look up ao486 for example. What I'm referring to is the expiration of patents from the P6 era, which would mean all the uop-based stuff is now free to implement. What a lot of the RISC hype doesn't understand is the huge value in backwards compatibility --- you can have your "100% free" world but it'll forever remain niche. We need to accommodate the proprietary world if we want any chance of freedom winning; and not try to divide the world of computing.
    - coldtea 5y ago
alerighi 5y ago
RISCV is an open architecture. If a manufacturer does that, simply don't buy the processor from that manufacturer and buy it from another. All your software will still be compatible since it's the same architecture. Otherwise with x86 is more complex: you can choose between Intel and AMD (that has bought the license for the x86 instruction set - not something cheap to get), and both of them had their backdoor processor inside the computer (at least on Intel there are ways to disable it, as far as I know with AMD is more difficult if not impossible to do).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Assuming that the software is all available from source and can be recompiled. Only the base RISC V is guaranteed thanks extensions. Also you are forgetting that just like Android and ARM, there are other forces at play that don't make it as easy in practice as FOSS advocates wish for.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > Assuming that the software is all available from source and can be recompiled. I remembered hearing that same line when I bought a Raspberry Pi in 2012. "It's useless! You can't run x86 software on it, so what's the point?" Flash-forwards a decade and now Graviton instances are blowing up like nothing else in the industry. RISC-V is in a very similar position to ARM 10 years ago; the groundwork has been laid, standards have been ratified and base packages/several kernels work perfectly fine on it. The only difference is that ARM is more expensive to license and is less flexible. > Only the base RISC V is guaranteed thanks extensions. Yeah. Is that a problem? The situation on ARM is equally bad if not worse (frequent iterations end up throwing even relatively recent CPU models under the bus), and the reason why RISC-V divided itself into extensions is so that you didn't have to start from scratch when John RISC decides to add in 3 new floating point instructions. It's a pretty damn good compromise if you ask me, and it certainly doesn't have any bearing on software availability; RISC-V programs run on RISC-V processors. ARM does not have that same liberty. There are plenty of genuine constraints for RISC-V (the majority of them in the manufacturing/mass production side of things, now), but the majority of these software issues have been solved and taped out years ago.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

Well its only a question of time before someone starts targeting the Intel vPro Management Engine and AMD PSB to alter CPU abilities using variations of code like that found on Github below. https://github.com/mostav02/Remove_IntelME_FPT https://github.com/mostav02/Remove_IntelME_FPT https://github.com/rootkovska/x86_harmful/blob/master/x86_harmful.md https://github.com/rootkovska/x86_harmful/blob/master/x86_ha... https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/blob/master/me_cleaner.py https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/blob/master/me_cleaner.p...

sedatk 5y ago
These would only help the power users, not the remaining 99%.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Trusted computing environments only hurt 1% of the users anyways. We live in a world where people talk about Thinkpads vs Macbook Pros, but for 99% of the world laptops are appliances they buy like we'd buy a toaster. They don't care that they can't run Linux, if anything onerous code signing requirements ala mobile devices would be great for the safety of their devices with minimal effects on what they can do. - I'm not saying I want the market for power users to die, I'm one of them after all, but I also feel like these conversations on HN are often disconnected from the reality most people live in... This isn't really a "they don't know better so they don't complain", this is a "even if they knew better they wouldn't complain"
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    The hypothetical homogeneous group 'they' you refer to doesn't exist. It's billions of people and 'they' feel many ways. By painting with a common brush, you shut down discussions of what could be and encourage fence sitters to give up. Let's talk about why it's possible, easy to do, and how to do it. The more fence sitters you convince that things are possible, pushes the fence further and further towards the other side.

kube-system 5y ago

> It should be considered malware like the Intel managament engine and thus refused by users. Well, that clearly didn’t happen with ME. Intel’s market share gradually grew for the decade after ME was introduced.

ziml77 5y ago
Also it's not like there aren't legitimate uses for it. My workplace started taking advantage of it to help with remote management of all of our machines. It's useful to have another way in that doesn't rely on the OS being in a good state or even for the machine to be fully powered on.

Retr0id 5y ago

> a free architecture that doesn't include that shit There is nothing stopping RISC-V SoC/CPU vendors from tacking it on.

smoldesu 5y ago
You're not wrong, but what's the motivation? With x86, backdoors and coprocessors were able to be added because both AMD and Intel were pretty much the only players in the ISA. Since they were effectively the only license-holders (and American multinational companies at that), the government had no problem forcing them to both add IME/PSP. With RISC-V, there is pretty much no such obligation. It's an open spec, there is no licensing fee and there isn't an obligation to add hardware susceptibilities. Chinese companies will (and are) manufacture chips like this at the lowest cost possible, likely eschewing any black-box m53s running Minix that you'd find on an American CPU. It also opens the possibility for more bespoke chip designs (as it's a modular ISA), and hopefully dividing the market between security-conscious products and consumer ones will stop all devices from being digitally wiretapped. It's all speculation right now, but it's highly unlikely that RISC-V will be pozzed in the same way x86 or even modern ARM clusters are. There's too much competition, too much money to be made, and too few incentives. Suffice to say, you're probably going to hear the three-letter agencies complaining about "unsafe Chinese chips" soon or something equally stupid.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  > ...the government had no problem forcing them to both add IME/PSP. This is a false narrative, these management engines were added because large (corporate) customers of the major CPU vendors asked for them. Enterprise IT shops love stuff like this, anything to help them tame the unruly beast of asset inventory and management. This is the same reason things like iLO and DRAC exist, and they have all of the same types of bugs for the same core reason. Not only does the government not want management engines, the ability to turn them off using HAP is courtesy of the US government (namely the NSA!) asking for a feature to disable it. The main problem here is that the truth is boring, and the conspiracy theory sounds much more interesting. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-now-you-too-can-disable-intel-me-backdoor-thanks-to-the-nsa.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no...

mnd999 5y ago

Raptor CS are still making those Power9 workstations I think. Power9 is also a free architecture “without that shit”.

spamizbad 5y ago

RISC-V permits vendor extensions so absolutely nothing is stopping a vendor from creating PSB-like functionality in a RISC-V chip. RISC-V is just an ISA.

thrtythreeforty 5y ago
I mean for that matter you can have a RISC-V core with an open source boot ROM that refuses to boot anything but Windows (pretend for a moment they deign to do a RISC-V build).

LeoPanthera 5y ago

> no longer allowing you to run Linux Is this actually true? openSUSE is supplied with a shim bootloader apparently signed with Microsoft's keys, allowing the OS to boot on any machine with Secure Boot enabled.

mjg59 5y ago
Windows is signed with different keys to all other third party UEFI code, so in theory you could ship a system that trusted Windows but not anything else. "Anything else" would include the option ROMs on GPUs, so you'd never be able to plug in a new Nvidia, but if that's a price you're willing to pay you could definitely block Linux today.

Dma54rhs 5y ago

It won't be considered malware because techbros have embraced Apples closed down systems and Microsoft and every other player is just getting up to date. This ship has sailed long time ago.

mjg59 5y ago

You're conflating two different things - AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) and Platform Secure Boot (PSB). PSP is broadly equivalent to Intel's ME, but lives on the CPU package rather than in the chipset. PSB is equivalent to Intel's Boot Guard, a feature that verifies that the system firmware has a valid signature before letting the CPU boot it. Both Boot Guard and PSB prevent you from modifying the system firmware (and, say, putting Coreboot on there), but because Boot Guard is implemented in the ME, and because the ME is in the chipset, not the CPU, you can take CPUs out of Intel-based systems and transfer them to somewhere else. If you do the same with a PSB-fused AMD, the firmware on the new board won't be signed with the same key and it'll refuse to boot. None of this technology provides any real way to prevent you from booting Linux. If vendors wanted to do that, they could already just ship firmware that only supported the Windows signing key and didn't let users enroll new keys. They don't need PSP, ME, Boot Guard or PSB to do that.

alerighi 5y ago
You said it: it prevents you from booting a custom firmware. If the manufacturer decides to lock down the stock firmware for only booting Windows (something that is not absurd and some manufacturers already attempted in the past, and keep in mind that Microsoft is requiring TPM and secure boot with Windows 11) you are basically screwed. You can't boot Linux with the stock firmware and you can't change the system firmware. And given that is firmware, it's worse than that: the manufacturer can with a firmware update remove (that you can't downgrade thanks to all this security bullshit) the possibility to disable secure boot and revoke the keys used by Linux distributions. Reason why I tend to never update the firmware of computers (as to me the firmware is just a bootloader to GRUB that then boots the operating system). The real thing is, we don't need this kind of security. We don't need ME, PSP, PSB, TPM, and all kind of bullshit. I've never herd of an attack in real life that exploits the boot process. When 99% of computers runs Windows that is full of security vulnerabilities, and nearly half of them even a no longer supported version of Windows, the other half a non updated version because updates are a waste of time.
- mjg59 5y ago
  A computer that requires the firmware to be replaced to boot Linux is already at the point where 99% of users are just not going to install Linux (I've personally ported Coreboot to two of my laptops, and even I would never buy hardware that required me to do that before I could run Linux). And, well, you may well have never heard of attacks that would be mitigated by these technologies, but I have. Firmware-based attacks have existed for over a decade, and the Hacking Team leak included a firmware implant targeted at some ThinkPads. Do I think most users need to worry about this? No, I don't, and I don't know that there's enough people who do need to worry about this that it should be the default (I have thoughts on this, I'll write them up later this evening). But to deny that some people do need to worry about this is just inaccurate. And Microsoft has required secure boot and TPMs on all certified client systems since Windows 8.1. Almost all shipped hardware already has all this functionality. If Microsoft had any interest in being evil here, they've had the opportunity to do so for years. Anyway! Even if you can't replace the firmware, the secure boot database is in an unprotected variable store, so you can just replace it even if PSB is enabled. You're welcome.

charcircuit 5y ago

>malware like the Intel managament engine The code is not malicious please do not call it malware. Your computer already has dozens of other chips running proprietary software on them. It's just a normal part of PC components except since a CPU doesn't have a board the chip is built right in.

neatze 5y ago
Seems like you are not aware of Intel ME past vulnerabilities.
- selectodude 5y ago
  That would imply that basically every single piece of software ever made is malware.
  - neatze 5y ago
    Not sure about every single piece of software, but what do you call closed source relatively hidden software in hardware that grants you full access with empty password, running on unaccountable number of computers for many years ?
- charcircuit 5y ago
  The only major one required an attacker to open your machine and attach a flasher. Usually it's considered game over if an attacker has physical access to your machine.

throwaway81523 5y ago

> Unfortunately both for Intel and AMD you don't have choices these days. I'm hoping someone develops a processor based on the RISCV architecture (a free architecture that doesn't include that shit) to be used in a computer entirely under the control of the user (hardware and software) and not the corporation that makes it. That exists for the POWER architecture, but unfortunately those cpus are way behind x86 in speed and efficency, at least so far. I expect RISCV will be the same way for quite some time. Maybe someday...

samstave 5y ago

>>It's a second processor that runs a proprietary firmware signed by the vendor (that the user cannot modify or substitute entirely with a FLOSS alternative) that vendors can use do harm to the user. This is EXACTLY what all the major handsets/cellphones have had in them for a very long time. Carriers required certain side/backdoors into the devices.. which was really a tunnel for LEO/State...

matheusmoreira 5y ago

We'll never be truly free until we can make our computers at home just like we can make our own software.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

I find it funny, how software, bugs, and possibly malicious intents are considered way differently than the same thing in practically any other industry. You buy a Toyota, they screw up the floormats, causing a potentially dangerous situation, millions of cars recalled, issue fixed. Volkswagen knows about an intentional 'screwup' (the exhaust cheating), they get caught, class actions, people return cars, get monetary compensation, etc. You buy an Intel, after Intel knows about a screwup... whoops... here's a software fix that cripples your cpus performance. Whoops, didnt fix everything, disable hyperthreading. Money back? Nope. Any other kind of compensation? Nope. Same with software.. they put an EULA there, and they're somehow not responsible for anything anymore. Here, you might lose a functionality that made you buy that computer in the first place, and "whoops".

saxonww 5y ago
The key differences are probably the "dangerous situation" and the "class action". Probably no one is going to die if they can't resell their CPU or install Linux on their laptop. And regardless, for a class action suit there'd have to be a class, and as usual the vast majority of people buying Lenovo are not aware of this, wouldn't care if they did, or actually consider it a feature; this article is about some Lenovo machines that I think are sold primarily to businesses who would probably like it if the machine couldn't have end users overwrite the OS or fiddle with the hardware.