Ask HN: Who is building secure open hardware?

6 points

4 years ago

Some recent threads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33308167) show that there are a number of independent SoC machines on most motherboards running without the control / knowledge of the main OS. The security threat is obvious even without considering supply chain.

Oxide (https://oxide.computer/) is making some running in this area, but I am wondering if anyone on HN knows about anyone (else) trying to re-think the whole thing?

I imagine that a government funded open spec that basically says "ok chip speeds are fast enough, what we want is to be able to put things into missiles / airframes / boats / desktops in the MoD without worrying".

Russia apparently runs a 286 (!) fab just for this purpose.

Does this exist ? is it a good idea? What's the difficulties?