5 ms·
> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors" That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese comp
by audunw 3y ago
> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors"
That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition".
Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serious about.
I don't think many big, serious device manufacturers are willing to risk being the target of the first catastrophic IoT attack just to save some pennies on a dirt cheap Chinese design, with some poorly verified RISC-V core thrown in with a power hungry Bluetooth radio.
ARM TrustZone is not something the RISC-V ecosystem has a clear standardized answer to yet. So I think that's a reason why ARM will keep its role as the main application processor in high-end BT/Thread chips for the next several years.
- graphe 3y agoEvery IoT device already uses esp chips, that's the only reason they can afford to make them. Them being low security doesn't matter, it's not like smart homes are secure now. Security is not important to IoT devices.
- jLaForest 3y agoEsp32 is not low security: https://blog.espressif.com/esp32-s2-security-improvements-5e5453f98590 https://blog.espressif.com/esp32-s2-security-improvements-5e...
- graphe 3y agoIt is up to the manufacturer to implement it, most esp devices like 8266 and 32 have weak security firmware, are easily hackable (benefit to me). Most don't have security in mind and don't get security updates.
- connicpu 3y agoThe new ESP32 models coming out, especially the RISC-V models, all have security features like Flash encryption and hardware cryptography modules. Unfortunate for those who like to reflash consumer devices.
- sitkack 3y agoThe chips themselves are $1 qty 1. Remove the old chip, put your unlocked chip in its place.
- IshKebab 3y agoIt's beyond most people's ability, equipment and effort threshold to order 1 chip from digikey (how much is delivery on that $1?) and replace a QFN package.
- AussieWog93 3y ago>how much is delivery on that $1? From AliExpress, it'd probably be $2-$3 including shipping. They don't ask questions when ordering large volumes of microcontrollers either.
- sitkack 3y agoMost people aren't going to be tearing down consumer goods and reflashing the firmware. If someone wants to get a hot air station and a bunch of $1 chips and reprogram their own devices, it would cost them less than a hundred dollars, 150 tops. Anyone can learn any skill. If you can draw anything recognizable, you can do electronics.
- baq 3y agohow much is the soldering station to do that?
- stagger87 3y ago$100 and a steady hand :)
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoThe chances that the popular wireless chip subsidized heavily by the CCP does not have a backdoor somewhere are too low to consider seriously. They are popular only because they are so cheap. Also, so far as chip shortage, China kept pumping them out.
- kees99 3y agoNot every... Ikea, for example, ships tons of "smart lightbulbs" with silabs/EFR32.
- antoniuschan99 3y agoThat's not true anymore. There was a shift to Beken Chips a year or two ago so a lot of your Amazon WiFi iot stuff uses that now (Tuya and Tasmota). Check out OpenBeken. I can't find much info on it but thinking it's cheaper than esp's probably more similar to esp8266 than esp32. Espressif chips are much more secure nowadays compared to the esp8266 days.
- graphe 3y agoThe beken ones don't have cheap Dev boards but I heard they are better sometimes. I don't know if they're better but DIY for them isn't so far. I don't think security is a real problem for me. Smart devices on their own intranet takes away a lot of problems.
- paulgerhardt 3y agoHaving bought a few hundred thousand Nordic chips I can assure you they don’t care about security in a meaningful sense. All Nordic chips are susceptible to bootloader attacks which make them a poor choice for storing key material. This can be mitigated in the design phase by adding an external security chip like a ATECC608B but if you were to tear down a device and see a board present without this module it certainly will have other vulnerabilities too. Having worked extensively with both Nordic and Chinese chips, what makes Nordic win is the ease of development - they are by far the best in market when it comes to programmability. Hands down. The security problems have been known since the NRF51 and despite that those vulnerabilities were carried over into the NRF52 because the cost of validation of chip designs is so prohibitive they did not want to touch it and filed the “oh some random person can extract the entire contents of the chip” bug as “won’t fix”. They are baked into a silicon ip core and can’t be fixed with a software update. As for RISC-V, there are some amazingly innovative and brilliant alternatives to TrustZone presented at the conference but I suspect Rambus may block innovation here using their position on the board (and chairing the security standing committee) in favor of their own (patented) solutions using an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
- 5ADBEEF 3y agoThe famous APProtect bug was patched in a silicon rev IIRC. Unless you're thinking of another exploit
- AussieWog93 3y ago>Having worked extensively with both Nordic and Chinese chips, what makes Nordic win is the ease of development This seems to be the norm for Chinese chips in general. Poor documentation, even in the native Chinese, no official dev boards, sometimes no JTAG debuggers, random bugs, just a whole lot of bullshit to deal with as a foreign developer. I suspect it might be a cultural thing; developers are less prone to pouring over data sheets and more prone to asking their friends/colleagues to introduce them to someone who works at one of the microcontroller companies. (This is just a hunch, and I could be completely wrong.)
- josephcsible 3y agoIsn't TrustZone inherently evil, though? Isn't its main use to let the megacorps trust that your device won't do what you want and will keep secrets from you?
- KerrAvon 3y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm. TrustZone is a technology for resource isolation. At an extremely high nontechnical level, it's conceptually similar to memory protection.
- josephcsible 3y agoThe problem with TrustZone is that control of it always resides with a megacorp and never with the owner of the device. It's not that it isn't security at all, but rather that it's security against the owner.
- msgilligan 3y agoThe owner can control Trustzone if the device is shipped with unfused OTP registers. On Raspberry Pi for example, you can write the hash of your own public key to locations 47-54 of the OTP memory block: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#otp-registers https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr... Here's the QuickStart for the entire process: https://github.com/raspberrypi/usbboot/blob/master/secure-boot-example/README.md https://github.com/raspberrypi/usbboot/blob/master/secure-bo... Note that the Raspberry Pi does not have a full TrustZone implementation to protect secure mode memory, etc. But it is a widely available device with good documentation and allows developers to experiment with and learn about the basics of TrustZone architecture.
- josephcsible 3y agoOTP and e-fuses are also evil. Devices should never be forced to become e-waste over them being set "wrong". There should always be a factory reset option that clears everything.
- weinzierl 3y ago"I don't think many big, serious device manufacturers are willing to risk being the target of the first catastrophic IoT attack [..]" You must be kidding, right? It's not that they would have cared much in the past. Now, I would be the first to celebrate a change in that regard, but it's just not the world we live in now.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> I don't think many big, serious device manufacturers are willing to risk being the target of the first catastrophic IoT attack just to save some pennies on a dirt cheap Chinese design, with some poorly verified RISC-V core thrown in with a power hungry Bluetooth radio. The small budget OEMs will save some pennies on a dirt cheap Chinese design. The big, serious device manufacturers will do the design themselves by starting with an open reference design and making some minor modifications that suit them, then pay someone to fab it because they're shipping millions of units. Who does that even leave? > ARM TrustZone is not something the RISC-V ecosystem has a clear standardized answer to yet. This has almost nothing to do with IoT security, if not being directly opposed to it as a thing used to prevent people from installing custom firmware on devices the OEM fails to support. The #1 problem in IoT security is OEMs that release a device which they neither patch nor allow anyone else to patch. And the first can't be a solution for small OEMs because they go out of business, so the only way to actually fix it is to have devices that users can update with third party firmware. For which the lack of ARM TrustZone is an advantage, since it's often used to prevent this.