Re:Nordic Is Getting Involved in RISC-V
by AnthonyMouse on Friday November 10, 2023 @05:16PM
(#38225280)
> 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.
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.
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.