Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware
bunnie, Sean "xobs" Cross, Tom Marble
While open source is necessary for trustable hardware, it is far from sufficient. This is because “hashing” hardware – verifying its construction down to the transistor level – is typically a destructive process, so trust in hardware is a massive time-of-check/time-of-use (TOCTOU) problem. This talk helps us understand the nature of the TOCTOU problem by providing a brief overview of the supply chain security problem and various classes of hardware implants. We then shift gears to talk about ways to potentially close the TOCTOU gap, concluding with a curated set of verifiable components that we are sharing as an open source mobile communications platform – a kind of combination hardware and software distribution – that we hope can be useful for developing and deploying all manner of open platforms that require a higher level of trust and security.