Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics after manufacturing that can be used at least in a well-equipped repair shop, and it needs it yesterday.

Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one. I.e. the first instruction that the CPU executes after reset must come from a storage device that is physically external to the CPU package.

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pietervdvn 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or maybe we should just get rid of the "breaking DRM is illegal"-laws. See https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/

	▲	kevincox 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, these are the most clearly corrupt laws that exist. It is like outlawing hammers because you may hit someone with it. It is just giving up freedom for the benefit of a few fortune 500 companies.
	▲	grishka 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That'll also work somewhat, but the problem would remain that even if it's legal to break the DRM, you can't exactly break it when it's assisted by hardware and there are no vulnerabilities in the "trusted" code.

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monocasa 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's probably not going to happen for a very long time. Relatively simple SoCs already do tons of work before the architectural reset vector in undocumented boot ROMs in order to assist the reset process.

There's also tons of value in a boot ROM that can't be accidentally erased to add low level DFU routines.

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altairprime 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This won’t help; the SOC silicon can be revised to record each executed instruction from power-on until secure-boot handoff opcode, with various supporting opcodes to query status-of / overflow-of / signature-for so that the OS reports pre-boot tampering implicitly as part of developing its own attestations.

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grishka 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Then also make it illegal for the SoC to contain any cryptographic key material.

My intention with this is to make sure that if someone were to desolder the flash chip and reprogram it, they could completely own the device without the device or SoC manufacturer having a say in it or a way to prevent or detect it.

	▲	altairprime 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Simpler to just make discrimination by hardware or software illegal than to legislate the silicon contents. That’s what everyone is upset about, after all: websites are gaining the ability to discriminate based on hardware-software with specific fidelity they never had before. If that was made unlawful, then you’d benefit billions of existing devices as well as future ones. The hard part is making the case that this sort of discrimination is worth fighting, but the John Deere lawsuits are (indirectly) further ahead on that point than the rest of tech is, weirdly enough. Example: I’m perfectly fine with my Touch ID sensor having a crypto-paired link to my SOC so that someone can’t swap in a malware-sensor at a border checkpoint; I also don’t want my device (or websites) to be able to discriminate against me installing my own homemade sensor. What that looks like in practice is close to what we have now, but not quite there yet — and is definitely not ‘no crypto-pairing at all’, as a ban on key material would enforce.

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aleksejs 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TFA is authored by the developers of an alternative operating system that can be freely installed on every Google phone since Pixel 6.

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subscribed 10 hours ago | parent [-]

....and this is only Google phones solely because NONE of the alternatives meet the team's stringent security requirements.

	▲	kajman 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The graphene project seems to choose security over freedom in a few cases. They also recommend using the Google Play store over F-droid IIRC. Not my preference, but they seem so far ahead of other ROMs right now that I use it still. I do believe people have built and installed it on other devices without too much trouble, but I don't think that'll ever be supported.

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userbinator 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one.

No, you just need to make it illegal to have the bootloader contain hardcoded key material and use it for verifying the code it loads.

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bigbadfeline 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics

Micro is now nano, not amendable to modification, and even if it was theoretically possible, hardware is a super-easy target for legislation.

> Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM

If you had the political means to enact such legislation, you could legislate much cleaner and easier ways to deal with the problem.

I find myself saying this a lot but I still can't quite figure our why people keep seeking technical solutions to political problems.

I mean, these things aren't comparable, in some limited cases the naive approach might help but insisting on it while neglecting political action is worse than doing nothing.

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dist-epoch 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader

funny how you think the solution to people imposing their will on you is to impose your will on others

also, the solution you propose wouldn't work because signed firmware

	▲	grishka 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And what code will verify the signature of the initial bootloader? As far as I know, in every modern implementation of secure boot that is done by that very bootloader, which is burned into the CPU/SoC. I can imagine someone implementing some sort of fixed-function block to do that, but see my sibling reply about that. Also, governments are supposed to act in the interest of people.
	▲	milutinovici 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's called laws