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Having 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 bo
by paulgerhardt 3y ago
Having 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.)
- zh3 3y agoThe security issues also cause inconvenience, e.g. the later revisions of the nrf52 needing either a recover operation or updated firmware (the hack of flashing a default bootloader in recovery mode that disables security is...interesting). That aside, Nordic still seems the best choice out there though quite a lot of features are leveraging the ARM ecosystem. RISC-V involvement is possibly toe in the water stuff/de-risking from ARM ("who owns them today?"). The recent big switch in SDK's (nrfSDK to Zephyr) wasn't teribly welcome, so the possiblility of another one is not welcome (if there was an approximately equal competitor with more stability we'd jump ship).
- snvzz 3y ago>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. RISC-V members have to sign an agreement when they join, which has clauses to prevent this sort of situation.