Okay, welcome to the open hardware devrim.
We are fortunate to hear our next talk on one of the extremely interesting piece of open
hardware here that implements a number of new ideas in how to provide a provider.
This is a very useful single board computing devices, so please welcome John Thompson.
Hello, good afternoon and thanks everyone for making it here.
I appreciate it's after lunch on Sunday and so it's been a long weekend and it's been
great to hear great talks on security, atostation, many, many different areas that
low-risk cover.
One of the things that we're going to cover in this talk is about an open source hardware
that we've generated for a project and also describe a little bit of what we do and you
may have heard of us through other means, so I'll try and explain something to that.
So what is this talk about?
So open source hardware and bitstream for evaluating chariot, what is Sonata?
So before further ado, this is the board, it's something that's been produced by our
colleagues at New A, a little demo stand as well, it's very swish now and it's for experimenting
with chariot and we'll get into what chariot is, but firstly, a little detail.
So what is low-risk?
Low-risk is a clue is in the name, risk-five-based company we were an outspin of spin-out from
Cambridge University, we celebrated our 10-year birthday last year and our mission is to
try and get silicon commons, so open source hardware.
So when I was last in the room over there 14 years ago, I hadn't given a talk, I was on
open source software and now we're trying to do the same for open source hardware, so
we're trying to make hardware the same as where open source software is now today.
So what is low-risk?
So non-profit, so it's a CIC company, community interest company, we don't make, we're
not for profit, we have a full stack engineer in team, so
if you were in the risk-five room yesterday, you would have heard about the open hardware
foundation, so our friends there who also trying to get open source hardware, we do a
lot more of the work in-house, but we also work on projects with other team members from
different companies, which will show in one of our big projects, but we have all the way
from LLVM, which was the basis of how low-risk started, we went into and we built
up, so we got RTL, we got DV, we've got a lot of different types of engineers working
with us.
So we have about over 20 years, we have two main offices, well two main sites, so we're
mainly, we're headquartered in Cambridge, there's a picture of our office, and we also
have security researchers in Zurich, and we're expanding, we're always looking for people
interested in open source hardware, and so if you're interested, please find me afterwards.
We're founding member of RIS-5 Foundation, which is now RIS-5 International, and also I'll
be speaking a little bit about Cherry Alliance, and we are the steward and maintainer of open
Titan, and we also inherited from ETH Zurich, the Zurrisky project, which became Ibex,
so we also maintain that 32-bit microcontroller, it's used in a lot of designs.
This work was also done with our subsidiary, NUE, so we bought NUE a couple of years ago now,
and NUE, I've seen mentioned in many talks, so they work on investigating hardware,
site channel analysis, fault injection, but they work on security research onto hardware
boards, and they're product line, which you can see there, is chip whisper, so one of
their main products, so that's the CW 340 board, they also work on the CW 310, so I sort
of mentioned, yes, the chip shelter, so if you're in security research, you may already
played with these guys boards, very talented people, Colin is a great chap, and so it's
great to see references in other talks in different rooms, and then we also have the chip
shelter, so this is a 3D probe for being able to do attacks on and be able to introduce probes
for things here, and they also run lots of research, so you may see them at black hat
if you go to them, so open titans, so this is our big projects, so what we do on this, this
is a secure execution environment, this is a silicon root of trust, but it's open source,
so I saw lots of talks this morning on bootloader, bootflow, you're trusting on this
TPM device, it's kind of like, oh it's the magic hardware, how can you really trust that,
we do, so we've opened the design, so it's all the RTLs there, all the DV, and basically we're
trying to go from, if the microphone still picks up, we're trying to go from on this left-hand side,
which is the sort of state of the art, which is everything's red, not open, we're trying to get
somewhere to everything green on the right, so we're trying to work with people, open synthesis flows,
we're trying to make everything as open as possible, and so that's great, we can say it's on an
FPGA, we can say it's been tested, but we got quite big partners here in this space, so how can we
prove this, truth, proof is in the actual chip, so we have an engineering sample chip, so that
we have real chips, so that was taped out, and we've been working with this to make sure that
it's ready for production, so engineering sample chip, that's good, some people get to that point,
how is this good, the great thing is this is going into Chromebooks, so if you have a Chromebook,
as of next year, hopefully, fingers crossed, we will have an open source hardware, secure execution
environment in the heart of Chromebooks, which is great news, sorry, okay perfect, sorry, there's
a microphone rings, just here, oh camera, right, I will try not to deviate too far, right, so yeah,
it's so excited, I'm moving stage left, stage right, so yeah, so this is by our product partners,
so we have on the project side, we work on the open source design, and then on the product side,
we have partners that you can see, well, new time and Google taping this out, so we're very excited,
so let's say that's our security background, so there's lots of interest in that,
how else can we show this loads of commits, if you've worked on security projects, you'll have
seen, this is the design people test against, so this is really active, lots of people testing this,
we're out and shares end of last year hosted by new way, lots of, lots of, it's real,
DV people are experimenting with it, so all that is to say, come back to what this board is about,
so we've got a background with low risk and UAE, and we were approached by digital security
by design to work on a project, so back to the content, so as I said, we were approached by
the SPD, which is part of UKRI, and there's been a longstanding thing to try and get cherry and
to the main stream, this is something that's been here for about 15 years, so there's been
research topic for quite a while, but what is cherry, what is cherry? So we have to motivate this,
so why are we interested in these ideas, so why produce this board, so there's security
breaches, what is interesting about security, you don't sell security, when you bought your
hardware for Christmas last year, did you say, well it's got the new security feature,
possibly not, you probably went on price performance or something else, IBM estimates,
you know, each breaches 4.45 million, hardly, you know, there's big numbers, scaring numbers,
and we're also seeing the number of attacks on these low-end devices, micro-traural devices,
increasing, so they're becoming more and more the target of interest, because they're connected
to the internet, previously they were not connected, now you have things that are connected and everywhere,
and they're a great way to attack, and so to make it relevant to the audience, hopefully some
of you went out and enjoyed some of the opportunities, so you know, we would prefer people to be
spending money on interesting things, rather than, you know, breaches and attacks, so yeah.
What is cherry, so memory safety, memory integrity, memory bugs, it's a done problem, isn't it?
It was fixed, we've got rust, we've got other things, well Microsoft in a few years ago,
60 years ago now, report and this still roughly maintains, which is that 70% of the
CVEs are still related to memory safety, memory integrity, so could you use rust, could you use
dotnet, could you use memory safety languages? Well yes, but you then have to try and fix all that
old legacy code, now yes, you can go through that, but I don't think people will spend time on that,
so billions or trillions of lines of code, but also there's different levels of compartmentalization,
so for new code, yes, absolutely, we support rust, and we think that's still useful to do.
Cherry and cherry it, so cherry, as I said, is a 15 year old piece of work from Cambridge and SRI,
international capability hardware enhanced risk instructions, and what we're doing here is
deterministic fine-grain protection, so I implore you if you interest in security,
if you're interested in memory safety and memory integrity, people have mentioned and various
talks about PMP, EMP, there's been MMEUs, there's been various discussions, there is a lot of work on
on this which goes, you know, on the risk five space, you've got 64 PMP regions, this goes into
really fine-grained resource management, so you can actually look at this, you can do ceiling,
compartmentalization, so this offers you a lot more, so think of a chrome tab, is your image that you're
loading, has your image library being corrupted, oh that's resource, well then you can do a
side channel tag in a scape and do lots of other things, so this is a much finer grained approach,
and this gives the hardware an idea of what memory is about and what it's doing, so so this is
this has been pushed forward, cherry was worked on on the, the ARM SOC, so there was a Merello board
and so that that's a 64-bit platform, people have used that, but the thing is that it's quite
hard to find, you can't buy it and it's a little bit questionable on how ARM will continue with
that support, incomes, DSBD asking us, can we do this for the 32-bit microcontroller world, can we show
that cherry is useful, and it's going to protect all this legacy code for embedded hardware,
which is everywhere and pervasive. Microsoft have worked on this as well, and they took ibex, which I
mentioned, you know, low-risk, you know, curate, and they've, they've combined cherry with an
out of us, and I'll show that in the next slide, and they've pulled this together, so we then
we got cherry it, which is on the embedded side. Firstly, I just want to show quickly the board
iteration, so I showed you the physical boards. We've had about a year and we've gone through
multiple, you know, going through all the open source design, we've gone through this all,
and now we have the products, and it's out there, and people being using this. Some of the features,
this is meant to be low-cost boards. We don't make a profit on this, we give the boards
with a very fine margin. We produce it, we give everything on here as a patchy-two license,
you can download the PCB, you can download the bill materials, gubernators, etc. You can download it all,
and there's various things here for experimenting with various things that you'll be familiar with
as we pie, hats, or greener shields. So anything that you could connect to, we think we've got
you covered on the embedded side. We don't, you know, it's not PCI Express, it's not things on that side,
but for low-speed controllers, which are still vulnerable to attacks, various, you know,
less likely to get interest on memory safety, etc. We think this is the area that's useful. So
lots of features here, which are good to play with. Block diagram, show how this all fits together,
you know, essentially it's low-resource, so I mean it's, you're not going to be able to do AI,
mining, all these sorts of things which are interesting, this is really focused on
the that hardware that's going to be resource-constructing, so it's all designed for that,
I just showed you the block diagram of that. And as I said, Microsoft took on Ibex and Cherry,
put an articles with it, and we've got Cherry at, so in the sake of time, I won't go too much
into detail on here, but essentially people are interested in this and open-source has been
people have taken Ibex, they've taken the ideas, and they re-contributed this all in.
Part of some birth project, which Sonata came out of, is also about teaching and in disseminating
this, so lots of events, we were at high peak couple of weeks ago, and this event, so we're trying
to bring the word of Cherry, we're trying to say that this is useful, you should be interested in this,
so you will see us trying to promote this, you'll see other companies doing that.
Keycabs, so everything, as I mentioned, is open-source, but we designed it initially in Altium,
but what we wanted to do is get the full flow, so that included the design, so we're very
happy to say that everything is now fully open, the only thing that you can't get is the FPGA design
if AMD wants to discuss, open-source in that, please approach me, but everything else is being converted,
and of course with Keycabs, there was a great talk earlier, all the great features coming up,
but yeah, one of the things which is very useful is being able to visualize it, being able to
explore with it, so hopefully you saw the Keycabs talk earlier. Now, as I said, one of the things about
proving hardware is going from design, verification, and to actually having chips, so based on the
success of Sonata and people using this, we've had an extension for the project, it's not very long
in time, but we've been trying to work with our new partner, SEI Semi, and we're trying to get this
taped out, so actual real chips that enable Cherry and Cherryet to be investigated, so real silicon,
and so we're aiming to push this all through, make it available, they're hoping to get chips
through MPW through 2025, so we're very excited about this, and the other thing is, I think one of the
talks on open hardware foundation, yesterday we were mentioning, why would you consider CV2,
type, low-end systems? Very good, this is very good for being able to do analysis, you know,
very simple microcontrollers, you can do a lot of work on it, you can understand the flow, it's not
doing all sorts of strange things which you get on more powerful devices, and so part of this,
given the security concerns and the safety and integrity concerns, is actually doing
formal verification, and we're very pleased that Professor Tom Mellum and the University of Oxford
are helping with this as well as the University of Cambridge on doing this formal verification.
So quickly into Cherry Alliance, so one of the things we said about is about promoting this,
Cherry Alliance is something new, again non-profit, looking to try and promote Cherry.
There's quite a few interesting partners there, so if you haven't heard of Cherry before today,
I hope you take away that this is something quite interesting and relevant.
Cherry Alliance, an open source, you know, so idea is to try and get everything out using open source
methodologies, we saw the benefits of Microsoft coming back, taking eye-bex, it's all virtuous,
cycles, and if you're an individual, you can sign up for free, if you're a university and non-profit,
it's also possible to work on joining for free as well. So if you want to talk about Cherry Alliance,
please just speak afterwards as well. So there's lots of work on trying to get this through,
also working with risk-five to try and get this adopted as part of standardization for them.
And the great thing about this is that these boards, unlike the Merrillow platform,
you can actually buy them, so I haven't been able to bring any to set up because otherwise I'll
get in trouble with customs, etc. But yeah, you can buy them on Melzer, this is a great way for
experimenting with Cherry Arts and being able to explore what is going to be adopted for a memory
safety and memory integrity. So there's a link there and there's also a link on the final slide.
So basically, there's lots of references, lots of information, and I do implore people to
investigate it, find out about Cherry Alliance, find out about low risk and some
invest in the works we're doing. So with that, thank you.
Some questions?
Hi, so thank you for the talk in the great work.
Especially I found the documentation, the website very thorough and lot of work being put in there.
So great work. I just wanted to ask you about the tape out that would happen. Do you
believe that that tape-out thought that would be there? Would also be a relevant for public
life-like disproject, guys?
So thank you for the question. So first, there was a comment on thank you for the documentation
and thank you for the supporting material. We appreciate that. We spent a lot of effort on trying
to get good deviant replication. There was a question on the SOC, whether that would be fully
open source. Now, unfortunately, there are some bits of that which will be painted to
there'll be certain things. We are verifying the open source part of that, and as part of that,
we are trying to get the sunburst chip repo open source. So it'll be a doppelganger,
so it'll vaguely resemble the things, but there'll be some other proprietary elements,
given the security interested in this. We would love to have it fully open source,
but through our partners in SIOC, we're trying to encourage them to open source as much as possible,
but, you know, we'll, yeah.
In SIOC words? Oh, yeah. And so, and the thing is about selling the SOC. So yes, I think that
there will be willing, you know, so that they're going to be doing mass market, and there will be
wanting to sell the SOC. How do you manage secrets like private keys and other things
in an open source RTL? So, the question was, how do you manage secrets?
Now, on an open source RTL. Now, for that, I won't speak about this board, which doesn't
have as much security SIA and FI work. We believe in culture, of principle, which is keep the
secret secret, and keep, and everything else open. So what we do is we say that, so talking about
open titan, that you maintain the secrets using OTP, fuses, you work on making sure that that part
is kept secret. That's the only bit of the design that you, you know, it's just that secret.
Everything else is open. So there are some analog items and some aspects of the foundry that
will be proprietary. Hello, thank you for your presentation. Just a little more detail about the
data out. Will it be an open source PDK and open source design flow? Yeah. So the question was, will
will we be using an open source PDK? Will we be supporting the flow fully through open source?
Unfortunately, as you saw, it was 22 nanometer FD access, so I, which is, you know, proprietary.
Unfortunately, I would love to have the whole design and, you know, in an MPW and being able to
experiment with it. Unfortunately for various reasons, it's going to be at that note size.
So I'd love to come back in a year or two time and say, yes, it's all going to be in the open flow.
Any more questions? If there's no more questions, we have some leaflets, some flyers,
some swag and things. So just please feel free to approach me just outside and I'll give some of that out.
John will be just outside. Thank you again, John.
So as you come into the bedroom, please do try to squeeze into the center so that we get