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Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics after manufacturing that can be used at least in a well-equipped repair shop, and
by grishka 5mo ago
Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics after manufacturing that can be used at least in a well-equipped repair shop, and it needs it yesterday.
Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one. I.e. the first instruction that the CPU executes after reset must come from a storage device that is physically external to the CPU package.
- altairprime 5mo agoThis won’t help; the SOC silicon can be revised to record each executed instruction from power-on until secure-boot handoff opcode, with various supporting opcodes to query status-of / overflow-of / signature-for so that the OS reports pre-boot tampering implicitly as part of developing its own attestations.
- grishka 5mo agoThen also make it illegal for the SoC to contain any cryptographic key material. My intention with this is to make sure that if someone were to desolder the flash chip and reprogram it, they could completely own the device without the device or SoC manufacturer having a say in it or a way to prevent or detect it.
- altairprime 5mo agoSimpler to just make discrimination by hardware or software illegal than to legislate the silicon contents. That’s what everyone is upset about, after all: websites are gaining the ability to discriminate based on hardware-software with specific fidelity they never had before. If that was made unlawful, then you’d benefit billions of existing devices as well as future ones. The hard part is making the case that this sort of discrimination is worth fighting, but the John Deere lawsuits are (indirectly) further ahead on that point than the rest of tech is, weirdly enough. Example: I’m perfectly fine with my Touch ID sensor having a crypto-paired link to my SOC so that someone can’t swap in a malware-sensor at a border checkpoint; I also don’t want my device (or websites) to be able to discriminate against me installing my own homemade sensor. What that looks like in practice is close to what we have now, but not quite there yet — and is definitely not ‘no crypto-pairing at all’, as a ban on key material would enforce.
- dist-epoch 5mo ago> just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader funny how you think the solution to people imposing their will on you is to impose your will on others also, the solution you propose wouldn't work because signed firmware
- grishka 5mo agoAnd what code will verify the signature of the initial bootloader? As far as I know, in every modern implementation of secure boot that is done by that very bootloader, which is burned into the CPU/SoC. I can imagine someone implementing some sort of fixed-function block to do that, but see my sibling reply about that. Also, governments are supposed to act in the interest of people.
- milutinovici 5mo agoIt's called laws
- userbinator 5mo agoAlternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one. No, you just need to make it illegal to have the bootloader contain hardcoded key material and use it for verifying the code it loads.
- ACCount37 5mo agoMost of those are less "hardcoded" and more "fused into internal non-eraseable memory at manufacturing time". Not that it changes much. It really should be illegal to enforce "secure boot" with no way for the device owner to opt out of it or enroll his own keys.
- pietervdvn 5mo agoOr maybe we should just get rid of the "breaking DRM is illegal"-laws. See https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
- grishka 5mo agoThat'll also work somewhat, but the problem would remain that even if it's legal to break the DRM, you can't exactly break it when it's assisted by hardware and there are no vulnerabilities in the "trusted" code.
- kevincox 5mo agoYes, these are the most clearly corrupt laws that exist. It is like outlawing hammers because you may hit someone with it. It is just giving up freedom for the benefit of a few fortune 500 companies.
- ACCount37 5mo agoThose laws should die, but that's besides the point. Modern cryptography allows for making DRM incredibly hard to break. And the disadvantage of "hardware attestation" DRM is that you have to break it not once, on a single device, the way you do to dump a "protected" movie, but on every single device that you want to use.
- monocasa 5mo agoThat's probably not going to happen for a very long time. Relatively simple SoCs already do tons of work before the architectural reset vector in undocumented boot ROMs in order to assist the reset process. There's also tons of value in a boot ROM that can't be accidentally erased to add low level DFU routines.
- bigbadfeline 5mo ago> Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics Micro is now nano, not amendable to modification, and even if it was theoretically possible, hardware is a super-easy target for legislation. > Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM If you had the political means to enact such legislation, you could legislate much cleaner and easier ways to deal with the problem. I find myself saying this a lot but I still can't quite figure our why people keep seeking technical solutions to political problems. I mean, these things aren't comparable, in some limited cases the naive approach might help but insisting on it while neglecting political action is worse than doing nothing.
- aleksejs 5mo agoTFA is authored by the developers of an alternative operating system that can be freely installed on every Google phone since Pixel 6.
- subscribed 5mo ago....and this is only Google phones solely because NONE of the alternatives meet the team's stringent security requirements.
- kajman 5mo agoThe graphene project seems to choose security over freedom in a few cases. They also recommend using the Google Play store over F-droid IIRC. Not my preference, but they seem so far ahead of other ROMs right now that I use it still. I do believe people have built and installed it on other devices without too much trouble, but I don't think that'll ever be supported.
- NoGravitas 5mo agoHonestly, I'm looking forward to the supported Motorola (Lenovo) phones in 2027.
- kajman 5mo agoIt's the only news I've heard about new-phone-tech that's gotten me remotely excited in a long time. I'm too poor to be buying new devices though so I'll have to let others do the beta testing for a couple years.
- subscribed 5mo agoWell, they're committed to provide as secure device as possible. There's no love for Google in the team. They recommend Google play over fdroid due to some security concerns, not because they like the service. The reasoning is available on their discussion forum. And yeah, it won't officially be supported on other devices than the upcoming Motorola and perhaps the next pixel. Too bad.
- loup-vaillant 5mo ago> Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one. Funny, I have a related proposal: make it illegal to sell hardware and distribute software. Or at least, if you distribute software, we don’t buy your hardware. The idea is to force hardware companies to release the complete user manual for their hardware, and incentivise them to simplify and standardise their hardware interfaces. What I did forget was forbidding them to arbitrarily restrict what kind of software can run with their hardware, which they could if the hardware hashes the software & verifies a signature before running it. But it would seem your separation between CPU and storage takes care of that.
- deaton 5mo ago[dead]