this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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109
The Risk of RISC-V: What's Going on at SiFive? (morethanmoore.substack.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Ian Cutress muses upon rumors around SiFive, the forerunner of high-performance RISC-V cores.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was expecting this to go into the direction of "China has inserted itself as a state level actor into the development of RISC-V, don't use it". That would've been ridiculous as the US has been meddling with chips for a long time and we still use their stuff. Having chip designs or instruction set architecture out in the open would give me much more confidence in a chip that anything AMD, ARM, Nvidia, qualcomm or whatever out there release.

Of course open ISA doesn't mean the resulting chip will be open, but it's a step in the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Indeed. We should also develop ways to detect sabotage in the design and manufacturing stages so a user can verify their chip doesn't have a backdoor

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

maintains the open-ness and customization that RISC-V offers

Thinking about cybersecurity: does this kind of open-ness mean that some evil guys could now design some evil behaviour into the hardware, and no scanner software will ever be able to detect it, because it is only a software scanner?

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago

That sounds like lots of extra work, when current CPU manufacturers built that hidden space in already. Intel Management Engine is a great example.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

security through obscurity is a bad practice.

it's better to be transparent and let everyone analyze your design. the more eyes on it, the better. even the proprietary and obscured Intel CPUs have had security vulnerabilities in the past.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think it's so much "security by obscurity" as it's an issue of a much lower bar for chip production. Intentional back doors or malware represent a huge risk for a product line, so manufacturers won't put them in without someone like the NSA leaning on them. It's a simple risk/benefit calculation.

But the risk is much lower if you can snag a processor design off the 'net, make your modifications, send it off to a fab and sell it under a fly-by-night operation. If it's ever discovered, you take the money and run.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you mean that someone can take the design, place a hardware vulnerability and sell it? Sure, but this does not require RISC V to be possible, there are already vulnerable CPUs sold on the market. People have found such vulnerabilities already in reputable Intel CPUs for example (look up Spectre).

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Dell iDRAC comes to mind as well.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

iDRAC is specifically designed for remote management of serves. Calling it a back door is silly when it's more of a front door. It's how Dell intends for you to manage the server.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's the same train of thought I had when telnet was declared a back door in huawei devices.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/30/huawei_enterprise_router_backdoor_is_telnet/

During the hey day I passed hcna-rs, the first thing we were taught was to just use telnet as a means to enable shh, then log back in and disable telnet.

Moral of the story, do not under estimate a nation state's use of global tech media to effect a global drop of a product or manufacturer from the market.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LUL. So you’re right but one of the horror stories I tell around campfires is how many folks don’t know about that front door.

So how about we agree to “surprise feature” for iDRAC? And, yes yes, I can feel the “they shouldn’t be admins” coming.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It has to be enabled, right? So if someone enabling iDRAC doesn't know that it exists...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

The person enabling it isn’t always still at the company.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

MFW a so-called cyber security researcher learns about IPMI

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Don't downvote this person, they're just asking a question.