zlacker

The US and UK governments especially have been sponsoring great architectures for security that are described in enough detail for hardware engineers to implement or straight-up open source. CHERI at Cambridge is one of the latter which already runs FreeBSD. All Google has to do is pay a good team/company to build one that's reusable for their various products and services. Then, they can start targeting those to it at software level for better efficiency.

The project would cost money that Google has. There's not much new to invent, though. They just have to apply what's there. The performance penalties and ASIC costs are even much lower than they were in the past. Google refuses to do these things because either (a) they don't know about them or (b) more likely their management doesn't want to commit that much money to secure hardware. Typical of the big companies with the smartcard market the only exception far as stuff non-enterprises could afford.

For a quick example, they did retool software to support OpenPOWER architecture but could've also funded Raptor Workstation in a desktop or esp server form themselves. It would've been to their budget like pennies are to ours. Not even that. At least they did the Chromebooks, though, which are good for a lot of non-technical folks.