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by calo_star 1237 days ago
Not to mention that no design is absolutely safe, and if security enclaves like Pluton get exploited to run backdoor, it'll be a lot harder for end user to detect.
2 comments

It's worth looking at the multi-year CHERI research project on capabilities, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007474, which has influenced Arm security features and roadmaps. Pluton could be viewed as a stepping stone to CHERI. From a recent blog post by MS Research, https://saaramar.github.io/memory_safety_blogpost_2022/

> these tiny parts usually run with high privileges and dramatically impact the overall system. In such cases, MTE/CHERI play pretty nicely - they help ensure that whatever bugs we have in these areas are killed at their root cause (probabilistically/deterministically). This is exactly why MSR, MSRC and Azure Silicon pushed for this AMAZING project of CheriIoT ... scaling CHERI down to RISC-V32E, the smallest core RISC-V specification. I’m very excited about this project, and I hope once we will open-source the ISA and the prototype, more folks across the industry could join.

That is a direction that would benefit everyone: open silicon and open firmware for the most security sensitive components. It is technically possible and at least some humans in big companies understand the importance to future would-be-digital civilizations.

See also: Intel Management Engine exploits.

https://kakaroto.ca/2019/11/exploiting-intels-management-eng...