On 22.09.2017 08:24, Edward Bartolo wrote:
> Quote: "if you build your own boards"
>
> You mean design my own computer motherboards?!

Yes. Daily job in embedded world.

And there're also lots of suitable standard boards, even complete
machines, you can just buy.

> that would
> not guarantee me that the actual work horses, the CPU cores, were
> clean.

The risk is pretty low: these SoCs are optimized on small size and
low energy consumption. The chips are much smaller, but also have
lots of peripherals included. They come in thousands of different
variants. And we do all the low level inits on our own (in bootloader
and kernel). So, there isn't much room for such hidden malware.
(the chip vendors usually don't even manage to provide usable
bootloaders and kernels on their own). This is a *very* different
situation than w/ x86.


--mtx