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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

my bad - misread

>and if you are not going to trust microcode, what else are you not going to trust - logic gates, transistors, electrons?

The article is unequivocally pro microcode. The title is him replying to people who don't trust microcode, so it's a rebuttal.

ok, i misread, will delete my comment - except i can't

we will distrust that which we cannot inspect.

if we cannot inspect the content of the microcode updates in the context of the architecture's schematics then it won't be trusted

That's already a lost cause considering how hard it is to inspect the die (ie. the physical transistors) itself.

It looks like a used SEM can be had for the highish five figures on eBay. Someone who was good at YouTube and other social media could probably justify the expense. Of course there could be unintended consequences of having viral videos showing hardware backdoors in popular electronic devices.

>It looks like a used SEM can be had for the highish five figures on eBay

What's the resolution on those like? Also, keep in mind that there's a lot more work to physically inspecting the CPU than just buying a SEM off ebay. You'd also need chemicals/equipment to etch through the different layers, as well the expertise to pull everything off.

Absolutely. And it's not as if the work of popularizing and profiting from that equipment and expertise is trivial either. Nevertheless, I reckon there's an opportunity there.

There are good reasons to not trust microcode. For example, a certain instruction chain can be made to trigger backdoors on the CPU and allow direct memory access for attackers. Catching this might be rather hard, though definitely not impossible.

Same applies to CPUs without microcode due to hardware design bugs.

Electrons are a ponzi scheme. The more you look into it the more it's all empty space.

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