Toward a Reasonably Secure Laptop

>>doener+(OP)
If I read that right, they're allowing Intel ME, which sounds like a sad compromise to me. Given that it's a pretty big complex black box that one can't easily disable, would you agree that x86 is doomed when it comes to security? If that's the case, is there any hope we could have a CPU with competitive capabilities? (For example, is there an i7 alternative for ARM?)

What could one do to make it possible to have ME-less x86 in the future?

>>d33+y5
I think the whole point of Qubes OS is t not trust hardware because of potential BIOS or ME backdoors.

Joanna Rutkowska, Qubes founder, is the person who brought up intel ME as a problem in her paper Intel x86 considered harmful (https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf).

>>zer0to+m7
You can't run trusted software on untrusted hardware. If someone has a backdoor in your ME, you can't protect yourself from it.

>>adrian+ti
I'm curious: if we can solve the "trusting trust" problem - that is identifying compromised compilers, even if the other compiler is compromised - couldn't we potentially solve this problem in a similar way?

>>falcol+xn
Ignoring for the moment all the indeterminism on a running laptop, the main reason is that we don't have the tooling to do that.

For example: compiler is to software as X is to hardware. What is X? And how does one go about creating their own X?

>>jancsi+Mw
Once you learn digital design, you learn how tools like this works:

http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/

Start with a simple CPU and memories you can hand-check sent to a 0.35-0.5 micron fab that's visually inspectible. Then, after verifying random sample of those, you use the others in boards that make the rest of your hardware and software. You can even try to use them in peripherals like your keyboard or networking. Make a whole cluster of crappy, CPU boards running verified hardware each handling part of the job since it will take a while. You can use untrusted storage if the source and transport CPU's are trusted since you can just use crypto approaches to ensuring data wasn't tampered with in untrusted RAM or storage. Designs exist in CompSci for both.

So, you'll eventually be running synthesis and testing with open-source software, verification with ACL2 a la Jared Davis's work (maybe Milawa modified), visual inspection of final chips, and Beowulf-style clusters to deal with how slow they are. And then use that for each iteration of better tooling. I also considered using image recognition on the pics of the visual trained by all the people reviewing them across the world. More as an aid than replacing people. Would be helpful when transistor count went up, though.

zlacker