Huang: Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

[Posted December 21, 2022 by corbet]

Andrew 'bunnie' Huang writes about his work with Cramium to bring more openness to secure element chips:

In my view it’s better to compromise and have a seat at the table now, than to walk away from negotiations and simply cede green fields to proprietary technologies, hoping to retake lost ground only after the community has achieved consensus around a robust full-stack open source SE solution. So, instead of investing time arguing over politics before any work is done, I’m choosing to invest time building validation test suites. Once I have a solid suite of tests in hand, I’ll have a much stronger position to argue for the removal of any proprietary CPU cores.

(Thanks to Paul Wise)

Huang: Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

Posted Dec 22, 2022 9:36 UTC (Thu) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

Those who remember the history of the SPARC LEON core (developed by the European Space Agency after the failure of a proprietary SPARC core) may find it ironic that the proprietary ARM core is considered "plan B"...

Huang: Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

Posted Dec 23, 2022 21:58 UTC (Fri) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

To me this is almost unreadable. I'm biased, because I thought Huang's "Plausibly Deniable DataBase" was a load of shit. Perhaps someone can show me, in a few simple lines, why this post is nevertheless insightful.

Huang: Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

Posted Dec 23, 2022 22:52 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, as Huang points out, the general attitude of the Free Software community is to refuse to get involved, until the battle is pretty much lost. At which point, making up ground is pretty much impossible.

Huang has found a company that is open to Open/Free software, persuaded them to put a Risc/V core on the chip in addition to the Arm, and is busy writing test suites to prove that the Open code works as designed on the Open Risc/V core.

If everything goes according to plan, there will be a (possibly only small) hopefully well-entrenched Open competitor in the space. That space being things like your credit card, your company id/access card, etc etc.

You can't advertise "Open" as being an advantage, unless you have a product to fill that space. If we've got a product out there, the big boys will have to compete, and if Open wins, it'll be a massive help breaking into other markets.

Cheers,
Wol

Huang: Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

Posted Dec 28, 2022 18:00 UTC (Wed) by acolin (guest, #61859) [Link]

Tropico (SatoshiLabs / Trezor wallet company) recently taped out an open SE ASIC apparently.