Leah Rowe has written an interesting article about the history of the Libreboot project on the project's 10th anniversary. Recommended reading if you're interested in the open source firmware ecosystem.
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Modern smartphones have a CPU chip, and a baseband chip which handles radio network communications (GSM/UMTS/LTE/etc.) This chip is connected to the CPU via DMA. Thus, unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily.
(If you just want some recommendations for what to do, skip down to the Recommendations section below .)
Today, Let's Encrypt announced that they are enabling an extension to DNS CAA records known as ACME-CAA ( RFC 8657 ). This came as a surprise to me, but a very pleasant one, since I wrote the ACME-CAA specification back in 2016 with Let's Encrypt in mind, and it was finally published as RFC 8657 back in 2019. To my…
Today we seem to be living through a war on passwords. This is manifested in various ways; in its most passive form, it takes the form of people blogging about how passwords are bad. The more material changes are the general trend towards no longer treating passwords as a sufficient condition for access in favour of…
The other day I rode on a Class 800 train in the UK. This is the “Intercity Express” train designed to replace the venerable HST (Intercity 125 with Mark 3 coaches, a train of which I have many memories and which I will dearly miss).
If you were deciding on whether to use AWS, Azure or Google Cloud for a production application, what factors would you use to make the decision? There are probably many such factors you might think of, but I'd like to point out one that probably isn't commonly considered: the relative trustworthiness of Google's…
The Intel Management Engine is an auxillary microprocessor embedded into modern Intel x86 CPUs or chipsets. 1 It runs an Intel-signed proprietary binary blob. Due to code signing restrictions enforced by the hardware, it cannot be modified or replaced by the user. (AMD x86 CPUs have a similar auxillary microprocessor…
This is a rant about smartcards with some digression into ranting about the integrated circuit industry.
For some time now, I've been reverse engineering the firmware of the Broadcom BCM5719 Ethernet NIC chip, so that open source firmware can be produced for it. The BCM5719 is a PCIe chip which provides up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and is mainly intended for use in server applications. It can be used with the Linux…
Devices based on the i.MX8 or i.MX8M (such as the Librem phone or MNT Reform) have received popular coverage recently. The number of firmware blobs involved in the bringup of these devices is often a point of discussion. At times, people have considered whether some of these blobs could be replaced with libre…
Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer “end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service, which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises “end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that it can't see your…