From AliExpress, it'd probably be $2-$3 including shipping.
They don't ask questions when ordering large volumes of microcontrollers either.
If someone wants to get a hot air station and a bunch of $1 chips and reprogram their own devices, it would cost them less than a hundred dollars, 150 tops.
Anyone can learn any skill. If you can draw anything recognizable, you can do electronics.
They are popular only because they are so cheap. Also, so far as chip shortage, China kept pumping them out.
Ikea, for example, ships tons of "smart lightbulbs" with silabs/EFR32.
I don't think security is a real problem for me. Smart devices on their own intranet takes away a lot of problems.
All Nordic chips are susceptible to bootloader attacks which make them a poor choice for storing key material. This can be mitigated in the design phase by adding an external security chip like a ATECC608B but if you were to tear down a device and see a board present without this module it certainly will have other vulnerabilities too.
Having worked extensively with both Nordic and Chinese chips, what makes Nordic win is the ease of development - they are by far the best in market when it comes to programmability. Hands down.
The security problems have been known since the NRF51 and despite that those vulnerabilities were carried over into the NRF52 because the cost of validation of chip designs is so prohibitive they did not want to touch it and filed the “oh some random person can extract the entire contents of the chip” bug as “won’t fix”. They are baked into a silicon ip core and can’t be fixed with a software update.
As for RISC-V, there are some amazingly innovative and brilliant alternatives to TrustZone presented at the conference but I suspect Rambus may block innovation here using their position on the board (and chairing the security standing committee) in favor of their own (patented) solutions using an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
This seems to be the norm for Chinese chips in general.
Poor documentation, even in the native Chinese, no official dev boards, sometimes no JTAG debuggers, random bugs, just a whole lot of bullshit to deal with as a foreign developer.
I suspect it might be a cultural thing; developers are less prone to pouring over data sheets and more prone to asking their friends/colleagues to introduce them to someone who works at one of the microcontroller companies. (This is just a hunch, and I could be completely wrong.)
That aside, Nordic still seems the best choice out there though quite a lot of features are leveraging the ARM ecosystem. RISC-V involvement is possibly toe in the water stuff/de-risking from ARM ("who owns them today?"). The recent big switch in SDK's (nrfSDK to Zephyr) wasn't teribly welcome, so the possiblility of another one is not welcome (if there was an approximately equal competitor with more stability we'd jump ship).
RISC-V members have to sign an agreement when they join, which has clauses to prevent this sort of situation.
On Raspberry Pi for example, you can write the hash of your own public key to locations 47-54 of the OTP memory block:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
Here's the QuickStart for the entire process: https://github.com/raspberrypi/usbboot/blob/master/secure-bo...
Note that the Raspberry Pi does not have a full TrustZone implementation to protect secure mode memory, etc. But it is a widely available device with good documentation and allows developers to experiment with and learn about the basics of TrustZone architecture.
If you start building your own hardware and/or buy devices with unlocked bootloaders, you can load whatever you want in EL3 to play with TZ. This isn't a problem with TZ.
You must be kidding, right? It's not that they would have cared much in the past. Now, I would be the first to celebrate a change in that regard, but it's just not the world we live in now.
The small budget OEMs will save some pennies on a dirt cheap Chinese design. The big, serious device manufacturers will do the design themselves by starting with an open reference design and making some minor modifications that suit them, then pay someone to fab it because they're shipping millions of units. Who does that even leave?
> ARM TrustZone is not something the RISC-V ecosystem has a clear standardized answer to yet.
This has almost nothing to do with IoT security, if not being directly opposed to it as a thing used to prevent people from installing custom firmware on devices the OEM fails to support.
The #1 problem in IoT security is OEMs that release a device which they neither patch nor allow anyone else to patch. And the first can't be a solution for small OEMs because they go out of business, so the only way to actually fix it is to have devices that users can update with third party firmware. For which the lack of ARM TrustZone is an advantage, since it's often used to prevent this.
That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition".
Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serious about.
I don't think many big, serious device manufacturers are willing to risk being the target of the first catastrophic IoT attack just to save some pennies on a dirt cheap Chinese design, with some poorly verified RISC-V core thrown in with a power hungry Bluetooth radio.
ARM TrustZone is not something the RISC-V ecosystem has a clear standardized answer to yet. So I think that's a reason why ARM will keep its role as the main application processor in high-end BT/Thread chips for the next several years.