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by wannacboatmovie 993 days ago
The NanoPi is of Chinese origin, all the way down to the silicon, how do you know the bootloader or the CPU isn't compromised?

If someone told you a cup may contain poison, would your first reaction be to drink it just to be sure?
1 comments
maven29 993 days ago
We have photographic evidence of the NSA intercepting Cisco routers. I'm not sure the country of origin matters if you have a red spot painted on your back.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

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wannacboatmovie 993 days ago
What's being proposed here - as an alternative solution to mass-produced Chinese equipment of unknown trustworthiness - is to purchase different mass-produced Chinese equipment of unknown trustworthiness.

Your example of highly-targeted physical interception by state-level actors is irrelevant here.

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maven29 993 days ago
You are really bringing your own OS here. The nanopi can run mainline linux and u-boot[0]. If you suspect an Intel ME-style component with ring -3 access, it should show up in the initialization sequence - there are no blobs here. Features like these are not cheap to implement, especially when Chinese vendors are so keen on cutting costs.

Essentially, this means that there is zero risk, unless you are a target, at which point any unintentional hardware bug caused by the aforementioned corner-cutting will become a concern.

[0] https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

https://linux-sunxi.org/U-Boot

https://linux-sunxi.org/H3

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chatmasta 992 days ago
How do you guarantee there isn't some logic flashed onto the chip that overrides the bootloader sequence?

btw, I asked about this 5 months ago [0] and got some interesting replies. I ended up purchasing a PCEngines board (just before they went out of business)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568984

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