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What scares the hell out of me, it would be so easy to backdoor an implementation of the open core in a well-hidden way. Whereas the "big" CPU providers are st
by ninjaoxygen 5y ago
What scares the hell out of me, it would be so easy to backdoor an implementation of the open core in a well-hidden way.
Whereas the "big" CPU providers are staking their reputation and therefore future business on providing a non-backdoored CPU, it would be fairly trivial for an individual device manufacturer to provide a backdoored CPU design for their chip design.
It could become the whole cheap-device OEM firmware situation all over again (as we saw with many backdoored routers), but this time the blob is located on-die, so is significantly harder to reverse engineer or audit.
- beagle3 5y agoThe main provides already provide a backdoored CPUs - Intel ME and AMD PSP. There is a a general belief that only some good guys have the keys. I don’t know what it is based on.
- marcodiego 5y agoThis is a problem with common thinking these days: " general belief that only some good guys have the keys". I paid for the device, I should get the keys!
- phendrenad2 5y agoIf you care about security, you probably don't care about performance. High-performance cores are very complicated and hard to follow. But, if you give up performance, you can design a core that uses very simple concepts, making it hard to hide a backdoor in the design. Things like Chisel, which let you write your design in a higher-level language, help with that too.
- goodpoint 5y ago> it would be so easy to backdoor an implementation of the open core in a well-hidden way If anything it's way more difficult that doing so on a closed core. > It could become the whole cheap-device OEM firmware situation If you think high-end proprietary routers were not backdoored think again.