36C3 - Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it whenever the question is how far hardware can be trusted, including FPGAs, supply chain attacks and firmware TPMs.
What it is
A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2020 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Confiks · 2020-05 · on “OpenTitan RTL Synthesis with Yosys”
Here's an excellent talk that addresses your question: Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware [1]. [1] [this video]
Strong rec Confiks · 2020-11 · on “Bunnie's Precursor Crowdfunding Begins”
Here's an excellent talk that addresses your question: Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware [1]. [1] [this video]
Recommends kfreds · 2023-05 · on “AMD's Firmware TPMs Vulnerable to Hardware Attacks, Defeating Disk Encryption”
As I'm sure you're aware FPGAs are nice because they can complicate things for an attacker in the physical supply chain. Andrew "bunnie" Huang did an excellent talk on the subject: [this video]
Cites skinner927 · 2021-11 · on “U.S. telecoms are going to start physically removing Huawei gear”
There’s really no way to ever be 100% sure of hardware. Sure we could use FPGAs for all hardware and then the hardware “source” is software, but who makes the FPGAs? There’s techniques even under X-ray to mask a rogue chip. [this video]