Joanna has proposed a model where we minimize the trust we put in x86 with a peripheral. Seems like a plausible path forward to me.
http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...
Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
41–50 of 282 posts
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#42Unbelievable. Yet again, we have a post on finding x86 alternative that's most FOSS friendly. Yet again, the author is unaware of or ignores the only architecture that's open, has GPL cores, and an ecosystem. That's SPARC. Oracle's T1 and T2 cores are open-source to study. More appropriately, Cobham-Gaisler's Leon3 HW is dual-licensed under GPL and commercial. The Leon4 is 4-cores. SPARC ISA is open. Open Firmware exists.
So, why is SPARC left off in all these analyses? It's right there ready to pick up and deploy. More open, easy to acquire, and trustworthy (far as licensing) than than a POWER chip although slower for sure.
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#431) requires FOSS users to purchase a license from Microsoft to boot FOSS on affected machines that lack an appropriate Secure Boot override. What "appropriate" Secure Boot overrides are available? 2) the end user is unable to modify the signed software without a license from Microsoft, even though they have the source code available to them under the GPL. Other parts of the posting imply that we have no idea what the…
1a) switch it off (iff the vendor lets you)
1b) nuke the platform signing key and replace it with your own (iff the vendor lets you)
2) You're mixing things up. "We have no idea what the software does" refers to the hardware management code, which can run a full OS stack. But that quote refers to the tivoization "feature" of Secure Boot: you can recompile your software, but not run it on the hardware, because you lack the signing keys to make the machine trust your code. But, see 1)
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#44I'd personally like to see the FOSS community try to embrace the POWER architecture: Ubuntu/Canonical are major members of the OpenPOWER foundation [1], so at least an entity sympathetic with our philosophy has an influence on the architecture. [1] http://openpowerfoundation.org
Red Hat has supported POWER for a long time. Debian does. Even Mint had a PPC release. The big BSD's do. Amiga's are still on PPC haha. I think it's not a question of FOSS support by OS developers. It's the users and app that don't commit to x86 alternatives.
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#45I've been looking into this recently. Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly "binary blobs loaders", having more binary blob than free software code running. There is some good analysis on why even Intel can't fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel…
People have certainly done ME reverse engineering: http://me.bios.io/
>there is a little man inside your pc... and his thing is bigger than yours. Your wife knows this.
I'm supposed to believe this technology is dangerous. But the advocates are children.
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#46I think that, given a large enough group of people willing to make a mass-purchase of CPUs, Intel would be likely to listen to requests for a batch with an open-sourced Management Engine component, or some shim akin to the one RHEL uses to boot UEFI in Secure-Boot mode. (mentioned it on /r/ReverseEngineering a few months back.) I don't know who to reach out to at Intel on that suggestion though. https://www.reddit.co…
The possibility I see is their semi-custom business. A cloud provider or someone else with the money can have them make one that strips out all the spyware or DRM stuff. Leaves everything else. Optionally, strips out some other baggage from backward compatibility that FOSS OS's don't even need. Preferably, though, smallest possible changes to the chip like straight up removing the wires connecting ME.
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#47I've been looking into this recently. Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly "binary blobs loaders", having more binary blob than free software code running. There is some good analysis on why even Intel can't fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel…
Also planned obsolescence by gradually slowing the machine over time.
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#48I wonder if Apple might do something about this. They don't care so much for the FOSS side of things, obviously, but I wonder if they might demand chips from Intel without the management engine, because it's a potential attack vector they can't control.
I suspect at some point they will simply drop Intel for their own (ARM) platform. I think moving will be easy once all app store submissions are in bitcode.
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#49[deleted]
Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
#50I'd personally like to see the FOSS community try to embrace the POWER architecture: Ubuntu/Canonical are major members of the OpenPOWER foundation [1], so at least an entity sympathetic with our philosophy has an influence on the architecture. [1] http://openpowerfoundation.org
A compromise for IBM might be to release old iterations of the ISA under liberal licensing terms like RISC-V or SPARC. Throw in open release of blueprints 5 years after first printout and I'd be fine with that as our collective target for free and open computing going forward.