Future of Open Hardware in a (Verifiable) Decentralised World by Matthias Tarasiewicz (Devcon5)

yeah hello everyone very excited to be here I will be talking to the future of open hardware verifiable decentralized world and to give an overview of what I will be covering in this talk I will first of all give a brief introduction I am representing about the Australia open source hardware Association and about the open hardware month which is happening this month the main part of my talk will be dealing with what open source hardware is what can we understand about open source hardware what is verifiable hardware I would give a few examples to make it tangible I will talk very briefly about how the security modules and trusted execution environments and solutions for the future that are based on open silicon so to give a bit of context my name is matthias Tanzimat i'm the director of the rad institute i'm also a board member of the author of the open source Heart Association and please get in contact with me in case I'm talking too fast or the slides are confusing or something basically I want to also refer to a talk I've been giving this week which was called the past present the future of opt-out with open and Libre Hardware at HTTP 19 the hackers Congress panel any Poly's which is dealing also with open hardware so it's a little bit was a bit of a longer talk about one or so this might be more of a contextualization if your interest this should be like online already I guess so um but brief dangerous riot we're an independent Institute we're working with crypto economics future crypt economics to me to be more precise we're working with privacy technologies and open hardware and we're doing this since 2009 and formally as this organization's is 2012 and we have a background also working with diverse open hardware projects this is maybe a more well-known project this is the apparatus open source Cinema Camera which is a full camera based around open hardware so every part of this camera except that the lens of course are open hardware so you can see my presentation at the 32 C 3 which I have been given at cost Communication Congress which is explaining the project is an older project but this project is still going on it's also interesting to see how kind of long lifespans is hoping how the projects have so I can strongly suggest if you want to see a quite large open other to see this taco gets more information that appear to stud org website you might also remember this thing this was actually a magazine we have live in after the last Def Con so it's a kind of a newspaper it's kind of a book obfuscated in a newspaper and we have been distributing this at the last Def Con and um this month we have two open source hardware month to open another month from the Oshawa and in this context riots and we will be giving out this kind of bags with also the future cryptic Atomics magazine but also with open ism conversations in open hardware which is a book and a conversation series where we try to figure out and find out how projects are which cut different open source strategies projects have and why are the open sourcing really hard we're hardly approaching it and how far can you go in doing so so maybe two contexts there's also the open harder month what will happen in this month it's already running the month and there's a lot of other events coming coming up this talk is also part of up another month and this worldwide events most different hacker spaces from industry from a lot of different actors there's workshops there's a lot of our formats and there's a lot of communication and documentation going on so there will be a lot of projects made visible online on the under the hashtag Oh hm 2019 on Twitter you can also still post some pop-up events under OAH m dot or dot org and maybe to briefly explain what this or schwa is it's in 501c3 so it's an arm association it's an NGO and its main purpose is to organize conference the community events to educate the general public about open source hardware to organize to open source hardware movement around shared values and principles to collect compiler publish data on the open source hardware movement to provide a painless way for creators to indicate that their products meet a standard for open source compliance and what that standard means or what the context means it's very visible on this website I can strongly recommend to take a look at so you also get an idea what kind of products are out there it's a very good director in my opinion to see what kind of certifications our author what-who under underwent this certification process I also want to direct your attention to this thing the open source it's open how the summit which will which has a 10 year anniversary and it will happen in March next year in New York so you can already get tickets to become a sponsor if you're interested um we are excited about this ones because it would be a very large event but I'm now to the main part of my talk so I will briefly introduce what open source hardware is so as a kind of long a description that you can find from open source that comic copied is robust as calm and pre-fit to to get us into the into the topic open hardware open source hardware refers to the design specifications of a physical object which are licensed in such a way that said objects can be started modified created and distributed by anyone that means in opposition to open source software in hardware we have a lot of documentation we have a lot of blueprints logic designs a lot of kind of descriptions about the object we are trying to open source and these all are ideally made available to everyone there's a very good sum up of this whole movement that about how the schwa came came to be this book which is called building open-source hardware which also explains all the pitfalls that come with open source hardware the differences also from a logistic point of view this has been edited by Alicia Cape and features also a lot of writers and a lot of different projects from the open source hardware context but to explain better what it is what is actually open hardware so as Michael Weinberg here I was writing in this book hard was already born open but we have to understand also that hard was very different and open source software because I'm in a way we have to understand that software is based on copyright and software protection the GPL and CC licenses are based around its are considered artistic work while hardware falls under patent law because it's considered a useful article or thinks the to stuff so that means there's a lot of patents out there in the hardware world so how kind of open hardware projects are usually protected then in a way is through its through trademarks as is very evident very visible with the Arduino project which is a trademark although there are a lot of knockoffs of the Rd you know everyone knows the name so that the trade lock is secured in a way there's a lot of specific open hardware licenses I listed here three of them there's the temporal license that's the Sun open harbor license where the second version is currently being in in draft it's very interesting read if you are interested in looking this up it's a lot of discussion also on what are the limitations of licenses and gplv3 is also a very common license not super common but would be the ideal license in my opinion for open hardware so these are the two most common unknown open other product so this is the other you all know it possibly it's it's coming from the maker movement it was it's considered to be one of these tools for the maker movement and of course open like like RepRap printers or 3d printers are also considered open hardware not all of them but the Ultimaker is Ultimaker one is an open hardware piece so in my opinion we can see two effects of open harder which are in my opinion really viable and which are different to close source hardware so it's very educational that means it's education because you can study the designs you can study the specifications you can look at the actual hardware could understand what's actually going on that also means you can potentially write your own farm about with the hardware that you are looking at and verifiability which is the point i'm stressing much more because in a much more a much connected world that we have today and also in regards to cryptography and blockchain verifiability is key in my opinion so also if we look at this kind of idea of zero trust verifiability is it's very important in order to make sure that we don't have to trust we can always verify and this is very complicated with modern hardware it's actually not only not even possible in most cases so I want a little bit explain is that they are very affordable hardware and we had a very interesting panel discussion today in the Sun it was a bit hot but we had a very interesting approach we discussed how vintage hardware could possibly solve this kind of security nightmare this verification debacle that we have these days long story short we're using a lot of non verifiable hardware these days so if you look at your phones if you look at all these kind of components that you have around your computers what not all are not really verifiable that means if I really want to know okay what's going on is there some computation that happened that I want to make sure that isn't compromised it's really really hard to do so so one in this context also refer to an interesting certification program from the Free Software Foundation who identified and they basically listed a lot of devices that can be used in modern-day hardware and in desktop computers that are not having binary blobs that means you can actually verify them by making sure that the firmware hasn't been compromised also maybe to contextualise limit the Linux kernel as a lot of proprietary drivers so there's also the little clearer um Fork of Linux which um tries to develop in a way the whole Linux kernel so I'm usually if you remove all the commits from leaders table arts you are almost good to go with the almost Libre kernel this is a very interesting piece of hardware also on this and I can strongly suggest any crypto on a case the cypherpunks on this device it's a it's an all that thing but it's 200 and the interesting piece or the interesting part of it is actually that you can use this because it's verifiable it runs live reports you can make sure that there's no BIOS backdoors inside you can basically run it has not no inter management engine on it so you can basically make sure that in a way you create your keys and if you use it in a kind of an offline manner you can even make sure that your keys aren't compromised but it comes with a few kind of pitfalls in my opinion so we have two problems still also with this kind of libera hardened with this old vintage hardware if we want to use this in kind of high security applications we have SSDs which are a problem because they again impaired another processor which could be potentially compromised and there could be other back to us um in the CPUs that we don't know about which in the context of the just shown device this would be eliminated because it's an old vintage device it's actually I would say like ten years old or something so there's a few attempts to solve this problem also from the open hardware movement and SSDs are the best kind of place where to put your implant in case you want to actually make sure that was away someone so this is the open SST project it's a very interesting project because it also educates people on how SSD controllers function and there's another newer approach to SSD and to to other kind of verifiability parts of hardware which is the chips alliance it's a common harder for interfaces processes and systems to interesting projects you should definitely take a look look at so I want to also point yet the common hard are we using in day to day crypto activities so in this context I want to also refer to a small exhibition archive which is like traveling around the F con it's called materiality of modern cryptography and it's actually a selection it's a hardware archive that we are collecting since approximately 10 years which are features like different prototypes different non release prototypes materiality is but also like this kind of modified it's modified dices that you see in the right top which are all kind of explaining different security concepts and how we are in a way because we don't trust Hardware again falling back to this kind of age before micro computing so I'm strongly suggesting you take a look at this also this is part of the open hardware dialog so we're trying to figure out and how can we explain and educate more about hardware so but coming back to this kind of day-to-day crypto hardware so of course a lot of people know crypto other wallets a lot of people use Hardware wallets these are trium quite common other while it's out there with a very different concept behind them also from a harder perspective so we have on the left side the tracer which is an open source hardware which means it's verifiable but here you also see that it's very interesting because while we have the specifications and everything available parts or the components of the open hardware are not verifiable at all because if the trust producer the manufacturer that this that is that the components are compromised so we can verify the treasure the most we can verify a hardware wallet out there but that doesn't mean it's the cure necessarily so you have to make sure that you secure it yourself on in the middle you see the bit some kind of a different concept it's partly open which means it runs open-source software but uses the hardware security module so you have to trust the manufacturer of the harbor security model a module that it is not compromised and then we have the ledger on the right-hand side which is completely closed source so here just an example if your kind of the verifying type you would actually be able to create your own treasure hardware and then load the firmware on it and run the firmware here's an example of a hardware based project that there was a talk yesterday I guess the status key card which is a Java card based how the solution which is basically an open platform develop your own workflows it might be also an interesting aspect but it's it's also closed its Java card it's oracle so another element you came across possibly is having a random number generators there's a lot of time but I made a few screenshots here of nice ones is the tiffer it might have been a really beautiful crafted device and here's the artist made from a more Libre device so this also is these are common devices to generate entropy and randomness in order for you to create unsafe keys of course there's also hardware tokens and there's a lot of them because they exist since a long time I just made a few screenshots of a few of them and these are very common devices to identify yourself and to do all sorts of security protocols and workflows and there is even more open elements than the ones that I was showing here is for example the solo dolo and form or a series which is which started as a kind of an open open source project it's also certified by the ashram and this is also an interesting hardware this is the neutral key it's kind of a multi-purpose or cryptography hardware you might have come across this because purism delivers this with the purism laptops in order to verify that your supply chain hasn't been compromised so sending you this device on the left-hand side in a different parcels so you can actually check ok is my buyers compromised or not so all the things I've shown you are not really verifiable or at least only verifiable to some point and we're using them on a daily basis so what can we do about that I want to briefly also go into the models I was referring to there are parts of all these kind of devices or partly parts of these devices I was showing which are having security modules to briefly explain what they are so there are physical physical computing device safeguarding and managing digital keys so we need them for strong it authentication crypto processing they usually in a hardware wallet such as the legend bit box but they're also in the Java card status key card we see them in the neutral key in mobile phones and RT devices and then on the other hand we have trusted execution environments which are isolated execution environments waken to secure processing where you can do untempered processing we have a few of them listed here there's the AMD secure execution environment armed trusts on Apple secure Enclave Intel SGX and others just to give you an example of the Apple secure Enclave um usually nobody knows what's going on so there has been a lot of like reverse engineering going on until people know ok what's what's happening what what's actually existing they're like whoo-hoo you can't really access it without like being Apple up without like signing a ton of NDA's so all of them are sometimes not documented you don't know what's going on they're not really verifiable for for you so you trust the third party in the whole security concept and some of them if not all will be headed in the future I mean most of them are already we saw a spectrum marathon we saw a lot of existing exploits out there we saw a lot of attempts to to break all these devices and it will be hacked so I want to show one example where this could be actually in the future changing and why we're not still the edge still wanna make the point that open silicon can in this context solve this security nayad matter that we're facing with all these Hardware pieces and it could also make our harder verifiable so here is very interesting product I want to point that it's the risk 5 it's an open-source harder instruction set architecture and on the left on the right hand side you see the freedom III 10 SOC which is the first risk 5 chip our produce was produced by c5 and there are more of them out now so basically what's interesting about these things is there are already existing replacements in the element that would replace HSM STIs and so on so I want to in this context point to two interesting projects which I found interesting and which are heavily worked upon so one is the sanctum the minimum hardware extensions for strong software as elation there's a very nice paper from Causton a doll from 2016 in case you're interested and their offers simple security analysis 10's checks which means like also from auditing perspective it gets easier because it is lower complexity and this can is approach of lower complexity in hardware is a very interesting approach him up you know I think we will be getting than a few years and these specific arm solution targets are rocket risk five core and you can already test this online but maybe a more easy starting point to get are working with risk 5 is the Keystone project the open framework for architecting trusted execution environments which is very interesting because in my opinion this is already very far and there's a lot of documentation out then you can you can get this going in your workflow very very fast so in my opinion risk 5 is a very interesting movement or a really interesting step in the future where we will see that open silicon can potentially solve our security now as we are facing with current day hardware but also there's other approaches so there's for example the vintage approach this is maybe not so common approach but there's I'm already a community out there which is looking at vintage hardware and like completely uncontrollable or like verifiable Hardware because it it is old and you can not so easy tamper with it there's also very interesting context and project I have been referring to am a talk at HTTP or I would strongly recommend you also listen to this talk and well potentially vintage hardware can also help disarm nuclear warheads in the long run well because there you have a really really complicated trust setup but in conclusion and this is actually already end of my talk current Hardware harder almost impossible to verify this is a problem we trusted parties with on the example of the HSMs on a TEM modern day cpu's so they are not zero trust so we need in my opinion more open hardware to verify and to be able to verify and for education so in order if this digital winter coming we need to be able to know how to repurpose devices we need to understand and to educate other people we need to know how these functions in my opinion on the example of the verifiable delay functions the vdf Alliance project this is a very good example because this is a project where you need open hardware my opinion because um it's a mapping in the past best practice example if you realize the verifiable delay fighters with open hardware it ensures fair access to the fastest implementations so you can also look at open hardware as a kind of approach to create equilibrium so in my opinion risk 5 can change the game but only also if we make sure that there are enough course with open licenses available so there's a lot of existing implementations of the risk 5 course which are with closed software with closed licenses so I'm strongly I'm suggesting we look at and we make sure that there are enough really open licenses available for this cause such as the glue license so you can follow further on all the other open hardware talks at the open how the amount cited Oh hm aqua org and you can also get in contact with discuss further at the right at east side or you can visit us today at 4 we have a small get-together together with trained security at the elsewhere exhibition in the third floor thank you very much [Applause] you