Comment on Chinese startup launching RISC-V laptop for devs and engineers priced at around $300
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 6 months agoYou mean you’re assuming that it will come with a backdoor in the hardware? Will that matter if the bootloader is FOSS?
Pantherina@feddit.de 6 months ago
Like… the Intel ME?? And no BIOS seems to allow the switch to disable it, even though that was literally required after the NSA sued Intel?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Coreboot disables most of Intel ME on x86 except the parts required for essential functions. It certainty cripples external access to Intel ME.
I believe it is a fair assumption that for embedded architectures like ARM and RISC-V, a FOSS bootloader will likely deal with state-sponsored backdoors if they haven’t been infiltrated themselves. This does not take into account baseband attack vectors because I simply don’t know much about wireless, but I’d imagine someone working on these projects likely has their eye on the funny stuff the NSA is likely to try here. RISC-V is FOSS, the NSA cannot legally require anybody to include a backdoor into the architecture itself.