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Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

blog.nordicsemi.com

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Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#81

Post by sweetjuly »

josephcsible wrote: post #60
audunw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors" That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition". Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serio…

Isn't TrustZone inherently evil, though? Isn't its main use to let the megacorps trust that your device won't do what you want and will keep secrets from you?

What are you talking about? TrustZone is an ISA feature which lets you mark certain pages as "secure only". Compliant devices with SMMUs should not allow any access to these pages except when initiated by the secure world. It's not some big evil plan by Arm. It's up to vendors how they use it. Many just use it for key storage and verifying biometric data so that even a compromised kernel can't trivially steal the most sensitive data on a device.

If you start building your own hardware and/or buy devices with unlocked bootloaders, you can load whatever you want in EL3 to play with TZ. This isn't a problem with TZ.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#82

Post by sitkack »

connicpu wrote: post #55
graphe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is up to the manufacturer to implement it, most esp devices like 8266 and 32 have weak security firmware, are easily hackable (benefit to me). Most don't have security in mind and don't get security updates.

The new ESP32 models coming out, especially the RISC-V models, all have security features like Flash encryption and hardware cryptography modules. Unfortunate for those who like to reflash consumer devices.

The chips themselves are $1 qty 1. Remove the old chip, put your unlocked chip in its place.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#83

Post by sitkack »

5ADBEEF wrote: post #66
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you might be right, I suspect there will be some years of people doing chips in both ARM and RISC-V to trial balloon it and see how it goes. Most customers will already have ARM toolchain they'd just prefer to stick with. But if it works out for them, I think it will be far more than a marketing play. Having control over the ISA and dropping the license fee while still getting access to industry standard toolch…

Nordic announced a processor w/ Arm + RISC-V cores on the same die. It's already happening!

Right before Arm becomes MIPS, they will sue customers to not put RV cores on the same die as their Arm cores.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#84

Post by IshKebab »

bfrog wrote: post #61

Espressif always seems to be ahead of the game. The premade compliant modules, shifting to riscv, providing a rust sdk, and so on. I like Nordic products in some ways but they are becoming very complex and not necessarily in all the right ways. Esp32 having ble and Wi-Fi in a single part is especially appealing, add in I can now program in rust and avoid all the cruft of C and it’s becoming an ever harder sell.

In fairness they were previously using Xtensa which is a far worse option than Arm so they had a much bigger incentive to switch to something that people actually wanted.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#85

Post by IshKebab »

sitkack wrote: post #82
connicpu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new ESP32 models coming out, especially the RISC-V models, all have security features like Flash encryption and hardware cryptography modules. Unfortunate for those who like to reflash consumer devices.

The chips themselves are $1 qty 1. Remove the old chip, put your unlocked chip in its place.

It's beyond most people's ability, equipment and effort threshold to order 1 chip from digikey (how much is delivery on that $1?) and replace a QFN package.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#86

Post by baq »

sitkack wrote: post #82
connicpu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new ESP32 models coming out, especially the RISC-V models, all have security features like Flash encryption and hardware cryptography modules. Unfortunate for those who like to reflash consumer devices.

The chips themselves are $1 qty 1. Remove the old chip, put your unlocked chip in its place.

how much is the soldering station to do that?

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#87

Post by 5ADBEEF »

MrQuincle wrote: post #70
5ADBEEF wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famous APProtect bug was patched in a silicon rev IIRC. Unless you're thinking of another exploit

Through voltage glitching isn't it? Which rev protects against it? Must be quite new.

Yes, this fix was mentioned in IN-142 from Nordic.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#89

Post by msgilligan »

josephcsible wrote: post #74
KerrAvon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm. TrustZone is a technology for resource isolation. At an extremely high nontechnical level, it's conceptually similar to memory protection.

The problem with TrustZone is that control of it always resides with a megacorp and never with the owner of the device. It's not that it isn't security at all, but rather that it's security against the owner.

The owner can control Trustzone if the device is shipped with unfused OTP registers.

On Raspberry Pi for example, you can write the hash of your own public key to locations 47-54 of the OTP memory block:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...

Here's the QuickStart for the entire process: https://github.com/raspberrypi/usbboot/blob/master/secure-bo...

Note that the Raspberry Pi does not have a full TrustZone implementation to protect secure mode memory, etc. But it is a widely available device with good documentation and allows developers to experiment with and learn about the basics of TrustZone architecture.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#90

Post by msgilligan »

josephcsible wrote: post #60
audunw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors" That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition". Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serio…

Isn't TrustZone inherently evil, though? Isn't its main use to let the megacorps trust that your device won't do what you want and will keep secrets from you?

This shouldn't be downvoted. It is a legitimate question and widely held misconception that is addressed in several of the responses to parent.
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