This is why we need open-source hardware. Close-sourced designs are plagued with so many issues, and I bet some of these flaws have still not been reported.
Agreed. Im hoping to see more RISC-V processors make it to commercial hardware. We are starting to see it with some experimental single board computers and laptops, but they are still much too slow. But its getting there!
https://milkv.io/mars#buy might be a good place to start, although im looking for the spec sheet…
Ive been on the lookout for a “good enough” server with RISC-V. Would love to play around with it.
RISC-V ISA isn’t magically exempt from vulnerabilities. You can still be hit at a microcode level.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GhostWrite-Vulnerability-RISC-V
For AMD, I’m wondering if OpenSIL can help prevent similar, deep system firmware vulnerabilities from lingering cross numerous product generations.
It would improve the number of eyes if you had full specs. You can arguably identify exploits and bugs much faster.
I also just want RISC-V :)
"GhostWrite is the result of an architectural flaw, a hardware bug in the XuanTie C910 and C920 CPU. These are only two of many RISC-V CPUs, but they are widely used for a variety of applications. According to the research team, vulnerable devices include:
Scaleway Elastic Metal RV1, bare-metal C910 cloud instances
- Milk-V Pioneer, 64-core desktop/server
- Lichee Cluster 4A, compute cluster
- Lichee Book 4A, laptop
- Lichee Console 4A, tiny laptop
- Lichee Pocket 4A, gaming console
- Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A, single-board computer (SBC)
- Milk-V Meles, SBC
- BeagleV-Ahead, SBC"
they would still be vulnerable. if you only care about security, you would be running a FPGA because anything fully secure would be slow, because speculative execution is inherently full of security flaws, and also the major reason why CPUs have any semblance of performance.
I don’t think that’s the issue. As said in the article, the researchers found the flaw by reading the architecture documentation. So the flaw is in the design of the API the operating system uses to configure the CPU and related resources. This API is public (though not open source) as to allow operating system vendors to do their job. It usually comes with examples and pseudo code on how some operations work. Here is an example (PDF).
Knowing how this feature is actually implemented in hardware (if the hardware was open source) would not have helped much. I would argue you are one level too low to properly understand the consequences of the implementation.
By the vague description in the article it actually looks like a meltdown or specter like issue where some code gets executed with the inappropriate privileges. Such issues are inherent to complex designs and no amount of open-source will save you there. We need a cultural and maybe a paradigm shift on how we design CPU to fully address those issues.