Hacker News Reader

Comment by z29LiTp5qUC30n | Hacker News Reader

well if you look at #bootstrappable's logs it looks like they are planning on building custom hardware out of TTL chips to eliminate all software/bios/firmware from the bootstrap; which when combined with libresilicon means no place for any attacks to hide.

View on HN

Well there is when you design signals that play on the physical properties of the silicon and the silicon design is known, think Rowhammer. The next level of this is making permanent modifications to the silicon, e.g. using focused RF signals to change the properties of individual transistors.

Relying on security through obscurity is bad, but you need some obscurity.

Passwords and keyfiles are ultimately a form of security through obscurity.

“Planning on” is an exaggeration. It would be good if someone did that, but those 120MB are still five orders of magnitude bigger than the MES seed, and that's a much bigger problem right now.

Unless Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson placed a "trusting trust" attack in the original C compiler, since virtually all modern code was compiled by something that was once compiled by it.

(Ken Thompson coined the term and knows how to do it.)

That's the whole point of these projects - they're preventing that type of attack.

If you implement your bootstrap C compiler entirely in machine code for instance, it doesn't matter if the "original C compiler" is compromised, since it's not being compiled.

To counter that, they're working on a bootstrap chain that starts with a tiny 500 byte hex editor and ends with a compiler that can build the GNU toolchain.

>building custom hardware out of TTL chips to eliminate all software/bios/firmware from the bootstrap

I'd be curious to learn more about this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com