3 ms·

Agreed that they definitely aren't a silver bullet! We went pretty deep down the secure FPGA route -- they (such as there is more than one vendor, which there a

Agreed that they definitely aren't a silver bullet! We went pretty deep down the secure FPGA route -- they (such as there is more than one vendor, which there arguably isn't) are very, very proprietary. (Not only do you not have source code to ROMs, there are entire hidden cores!) Indeed, we ultimately abandoned that route for quotidian reasons: we couldn't get their proprietary toolchain to work reliably on a Linux box, and we were getting the runaround. Our belief was that if their support was so bad on something so simple, it was going to be much worse when we found more serious issues with the device. Our view was (and is) that open FPGAs are a necessary (but not sufficient) step to get us to secure FPGAs.

panick21_ 5y ago
You might be interested in Precursor and the Betrusted Platform. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor They are trying to have an hardware platform that can be inspected and it is based on an FPGA with a RISC-V Softcore. Its by Bunnie, and he great talks about the choices and why he made them: Keynote: Precursor - Trustable Open Hardware for Everyday Use - Bunnie Huang (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw5FEuGRrLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw5FEuGRrLE) They are also doing their own Rust Message passing OS called Xous that might be of interest. https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core
- bcantrill 5y ago
  Interesting! I (obviously?) hold Bunnie's work in very high regard, but I had not seen Xous before. It seems to be similar in some respects to Hubris[0], but it's hard to discern its design center as most of the documentation appears to be forthcoming? Regardless, it's great to see more work in this important domain! [0] http://cliffle.com/blog/on-hubris-and-humility/ http://cliffle.com/blog/on-hubris-and-humility/
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Xous seems to be one step up from Hubris in terms of being oriented towards interactive applications and running full UI and dynamically loading applications. I have not enough knowledge about the underlying message passing semantics to give an educated differentiation. Maybe the most interesting feature is the Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB). See: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 Here is some of the design intent behind Xous explained by its main designer: https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 He described Tock as to small and Redox as to big in one of the talks.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    bunnie made a 1-hour video that walks through the Precursor tech stack (no, not ideal from an accessibility perspective): https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 IIUC, Xous is designed for environments that aren't quite as constrained as the microcontrollers that Hubris runs on. Precursor has 16 MB of RAM and 128 MB of SPI flash. There's some kind of support for separate executables, but the OS and applications are packaged in one image. Whatever flash isn't used by that image is for user storage. Also, they've got the Rust std library, or at least some subset of it, running on Xous. Incidentally, bunnie is working with me on a version of Precursor with a braille keyboard and text-to-speech output. I got my prototype unit today. So I'll be digging into Xous more soon. bunnie wrote a nice article about the process of designing the braille keyboard here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/whats-the-value-of-hackable-hardware-anyway https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... and covered more recent developments on that front, including meaty technical details on the software side, in a recent status update: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/more-supply-chain-issues-surprise-edition-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... I still need to figure out the use cases that Precursor is best suited for, given the modest hardware specs, but it's still cool to have a fully open mobile hardware platform that's fully accessible.

panick21_ 5y ago

You might be interested in Precursor and the Betrusted Platform. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor They are trying to have an hardware platform that can be inspected and it is based on an FPGA with a RISC-V Softcore. Its by Bunnie, and he great talks about the choices and why he made them: Keynote: Precursor - Trustable Open Hardware for Everyday Use - Bunnie Huang (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw5FEuGRrLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw5FEuGRrLE) They are also doing their own Rust Message passing OS called Xous that might be of interest. https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core

bcantrill 5y ago
Interesting! I (obviously?) hold Bunnie's work in very high regard, but I had not seen Xous before. It seems to be similar in some respects to Hubris[0], but it's hard to discern its design center as most of the documentation appears to be forthcoming? Regardless, it's great to see more work in this important domain! [0] http://cliffle.com/blog/on-hubris-and-humility/ http://cliffle.com/blog/on-hubris-and-humility/
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Xous seems to be one step up from Hubris in terms of being oriented towards interactive applications and running full UI and dynamically loading applications. I have not enough knowledge about the underlying message passing semantics to give an educated differentiation. Maybe the most interesting feature is the Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB). See: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 Here is some of the design intent behind Xous explained by its main designer: https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 He described Tock as to small and Redox as to big in one of the talks.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  bunnie made a 1-hour video that walks through the Precursor tech stack (no, not ideal from an accessibility perspective): https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 IIUC, Xous is designed for environments that aren't quite as constrained as the microcontrollers that Hubris runs on. Precursor has 16 MB of RAM and 128 MB of SPI flash. There's some kind of support for separate executables, but the OS and applications are packaged in one image. Whatever flash isn't used by that image is for user storage. Also, they've got the Rust std library, or at least some subset of it, running on Xous. Incidentally, bunnie is working with me on a version of Precursor with a braille keyboard and text-to-speech output. I got my prototype unit today. So I'll be digging into Xous more soon. bunnie wrote a nice article about the process of designing the braille keyboard here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/whats-the-value-of-hackable-hardware-anyway https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... and covered more recent developments on that front, including meaty technical details on the software side, in a recent status update: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/more-supply-chain-issues-surprise-edition-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... I still need to figure out the use cases that Precursor is best suited for, given the modest hardware specs, but it's still cool to have a fully open mobile hardware platform that's fully accessible.