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Comment by bick_nyers | Hacker News Reader

This is an amazing idea and I would only buy a product that has this stamp on them. I would put some additional triggers into the publication of source code as well, notably if the company goes out of business. I would also put some kind of timer and renewal process on it, like a company needs to recertify every 1-5 years (pros and cons to different time lengths) and that they have indeed been providing actual updates (and not just fake ones) and actual support.

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The OEM could be allowed to choose their recertification period, perhaps with slight differences in requirements. Perhaps even different options offered by company size. For example 1-5 employee companies might get a "no recertification, provided as-is" option which releases automatically 3 years after filing. Vendors who re-certify every 6 months could get an extra mark on their stamp or whatever. There are tons of possibilities honestly, and though I've been thinking about it for a long time writing it is much easier to come up with more.

Agree this approach seems to be worth investigating further, but as a citizen of a non-US country, I'd like to see a solution that wasn't based on a US-centric set of controls and governance bodies.

These days, with nationalism and populism rampant across the world, I think we need a solution where no one country (or country's leader) can simply decide to turn off critical infrastructure for the rest of the world and/or hold the rest of the world to ransom. Then you run into questions of "do we really want (insert bad country) to be able to expose IOT source code to their evil hackers?".

This is a really difficult problem to solve, but ultimately I think ownership of the "keys" to unlock escrowed code needs to reside with (winging it here...) a body such as IEEE or ISO. Or possibly something like a global council where e.g. any 5 countries out of 7 can collaborate via a sharing of keys to release source code, but no one country is able to do so.

I completely agree that such a thing should not be US-only. There would need to be a clear distinction between one-gov't backdoor and voluntary regulatory certification, because ultimately the goal would be for other countries to follow suit and provide similar/identical certifications. You could look to standards bodies to provide standard implementation details on what "firmware escrow" is, what exact formats and files must be included, etc. IEEE, ISO, JIS, DIN, and all of them could write or adopt the document. But actually running the service and providing the certification is a little closer to a patent office than organizing standards which is why I propose doing it federally. Think Energy Star (which is a US gov't program based on EPA standards) which has been implemented successfully outside of the US.

Classic tech to think of technical solutions to a regulatory problem, but I like it.

Could have the code run in a sandbox where people can apply “external” network traffic trying to hack it (or apply vulnerabilities), inspired by how you can run ML models on kaggle.org on Kaggle servers to validate models.

Have end-points as honney-pots, so if you can access these endpoint you prove you have compromised the code.

If there is no new code with patches the keys are released.

This way FCC/gov don’t need to maintain a technical system. Just build this once.

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