Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms (2016)

Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by narrator on Friday March 03, 2017 @06:21PM (#13787862)

Want complete software freedom? How about the MIPS chips the Russian military uses[1]? Those don't have an NSA back door. Sucks you can't really buy them as they are only made for use in Russian military and government applications.

"Last year, the Russian government announced that it doesn't want to rely on Intel and AMD chips from the U.S. anymore and will focus more on using homegrown chips from Russia."

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/baikal-t1-mips-cpu-omnishie...

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Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by theamk on Friday March 03, 2017 @10:57PM (#13789148)

Well, the actual CPU cores are designed by Imagination Technologies, which are based in UK. I would not be so sure that they are fully safe.

You can make an argument that it is still an improvement, because there are no obvious binary blobs required by the system. But in this case, I would recommend going for one of the many Chinese ARM cores -- at least you can buy them easily.

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Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by throwawayish on Saturday March 04, 2017 @05:06AM (#13790217)

There are also the Elbrus processors which I believe are entirely designed in Russia, although some models are manufactured by TSMC (and some are manufactured in Russia).

The early models implemented a proprietary VLIW architecture with enterprise-y features (like hardware-tagged pointers, probably borrowed-ish from Itanium) with a dynamic binary translation layer for x86 compatibility on top, not sure if they still do that or perhaps the other way around now.

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Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by memmcgee on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:07PM (#13788152)

Those probably have Russian backdoors though.

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Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by sattoshi on Friday March 03, 2017 @08:22PM (#13788543)

In most cases, a foreign gov spying on you is harmless.

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Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by c22 on Friday March 03, 2017 @08:34PM (#13788581)

In most cases a foreign government spying on you is trading their insights with your government in order to sidestep domestic spying restrictions.

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Re:Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platform... by zipwitch on Friday March 03, 2017 @09:46PM (#13788867)

What are the chances that the access pass from the foreign government to actors you don't want spying on you: criminals or your own government's intel agencies?

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