Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ktx2 | Hacker News Reader

Usually when I hear people talk about backdooring it's usually on the network stack. On a phone that would be a modem.

Most devices, even in your computer (eg: laptop battery) run an OS. There's a good talk somewhere on how we've lost our way with OS design and now need to write an OS that looks at a single machine as a distributed system.

View on HN

Is it this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo

USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware

Edit or this one (not a talk but a paper)?

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-shan.pdf

LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed OS for Hardware Resource Disaggregation ... We propose a new OS model called the splitkernel to manage disaggregated systems. Splitkernel disseminates traditional OS functionalities into loosely-coupled mon- itors, each of which runs on and manages a hardware component

Similar enough! The one that I'm thinking of was the only actual non Linux talk (and really, OS development talk) at a OS Dev conference.

Some batteries have an entire stm32 series microcontroller in them, I've seen battery controllers that are actually the same "CPU" as on a discrete single motor quadcopter ESC.

Apple's laptop batteries in 2008 MacBook models have an independent microcontroller in them, which enables apple to manage it at a much more advanced level.

That generation of laptops can detect a problem with the battery much earlier (e.g. It can warn the user a year before the battery starts to swell. Been there, seen that). This knowledge is the basis of apple's battery technology that we see on their mobiles (iOS and macOS) today.

IIRC the password on these things were set to a default one and a PoC exploit was written for that platform.

IBM PC keyboard from 1981 (and all later external PC & Mac keyboards) have an independent microcontroller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48#Uses

MicroSD cards have a fully functional 32-bit microcontroller in them, it manages the write leveling and bad sector mitigation, but it's a fully fledged CPU otherwise.

And, there's a couple of great write-ups about them [0][1].

[0]: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

[1]: https://i.blackhat.com/us-18/Wed-August-8/us-18-Valadon-Reve...

> and now need to write an OS that looks at a single machine as a distributed system

Exactly, currently they are too easily exploitable because they are not joined up.

You see it with gpu's being hacked and the OS not recognising this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com