This looks great, and I applaud their efforts. The military typically has had a fleet of absolutely crappy Dell/HP laptops running equally crappy Windows software and all of it is in my view maintained and secured to set standards but just works like crap.
If this becomes available for personal use it's the HN dream with the focus (from what I can tell) on security, "zero trust", and presumably modularity. Presumably it'll work best with Linux too.
No reason to be suspicious any more than any other equipment you'd buy, well unless you're not also worried about Chinese backdoors on equipment manufacturers or other backdoors from other countries. Much rather trust the US obviously. (I'm not open to debate about this though others maybe be). Plus it looks like these would be built for the US military/government so backdoors would make sense and wouldn't be worried about aside from the general security concerns always espoused. But you're competing with crappy Dell laptops and stuff so the bar is already as low as it possible gets there.
Open hardware is great but someone has to build it and it has to be better. Most of the time it's way worse. I'm a little unsure about what these Zerotrust architecture claims are going to turn out to be:
Restored computer sovereignty begins with local supply chains of trusted domestic and allied partners, and extends to Zero Trust architecture.
Maybe even if the hardware (again there is very little of this) isn't open at least having some guardrails around the supply chain would be good.
These are decades old, known vulnerabilities. So you can extrapolate the more clever, hidden exploits.
It first takes getting our colleauges/people to care about not buying backdoored products - knowledge of these is pretty low and people don't flock to alternatives :/
I did happen across a RISC-V component in a slide today, so at least some people are building on a more open system, even if their component is not likely open.
That concept is not especially new, there have been historical HN posts about using microphones to listen to see if you are muting the commercials or not. Similar to this user tracking, my building recently installed ButterflyMX door entry, which not only tracks when you go in and out and sells that for advertising, but tracks you and your friends across properties to find connections between people.
Still, and while I find both extremely inappropriate, hardware backdoors are in another class. Nvidia's ambitions for remote disabling and charging rent to use keep using GPUs are more unsettling to me than a smart TV I can just simply not connect to the internet.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 3.8 ms ] threadIf this becomes available for personal use it's the HN dream with the focus (from what I can tell) on security, "zero trust", and presumably modularity. Presumably it'll work best with Linux too.
Open hardware is the way to trusted security
Open hardware is great but someone has to build it and it has to be better. Most of the time it's way worse. I'm a little unsure about what these Zerotrust architecture claims are going to turn out to be:
Maybe even if the hardware (again there is very little of this) isn't open at least having some guardrails around the supply chain would be good.BIOS, boot and CPUs are already quite insecure for the operator today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpXkJqTAY5Y https://libreboot.org/faq.html https://github.com/unnideeraj/article_backdoor https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/reverse-engineering-the-amd-...
These are decades old, known vulnerabilities. So you can extrapolate the more clever, hidden exploits.
It first takes getting our colleauges/people to care about not buying backdoored products - knowledge of these is pretty low and people don't flock to alternatives :/
https://www.hardware-corner.net/xiaomi-ai-cube-targets-local...
Open source as an idea is spreading to other industries, eg. https://commonpaper.com
Still, and while I find both extremely inappropriate, hardware backdoors are in another class. Nvidia's ambitions for remote disabling and charging rent to use keep using GPUs are more unsettling to me than a smart TV I can just simply not connect to the internet.