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by colejohnson66 821 days ago
This RISC-V evangelism is worrying. Using RISC-V doesn't make your system secure; Good ISA implementations do. The ISA has no bearing on security vulnerabilities. Perhaps a faulty decoder could be a vulnerability vector, but a faulty RISC-V decoder wouldn't be compliant, and neither would a faulty ARM decoder.

If I add a custom crypto extension to a RISC-V core and implement it badly, is that the fault of RISC-V? No! It's my own. And RISC-V doesn't help anyone here because their license allows me to keep my extension completely closed source - no different than Apple is today with ARM.
2 comments
xpuente 821 days ago
My comment was not about the ISA implementation or specification, It's about the TCB (trusted compute base), which in Apple (like intel and AMD) is closed. In RiscV is open. I would recommend you to educate yourself on any topic before lecture others.
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snvzz 820 days ago
>The ISA has no bearing on security vulnerabilities.

Complexity leads to bugs, some of which are going to be security bugs.

ISAs impose complexity upon implementations. To claim they do not matter would be disingenuous.

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