Novena: A Laptop with No Secrets

http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/novena-a-laptop-with-no-secrets

by zmanian • 11 years ago

446 109 11 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

mmastrac2• 11 years ago

If the heirloom version didn't sell out so quickly I might have bought one. Fortunately for my wallet they were gone fast!

Might be worth laser-cutting a case out of nice wood for one though. Hmm.

catskull3• 11 years ago

This open-source requirement of ours ended up influencing the selection of almost every piece of hardware, including the main CPU, the battery controller, and the Wi-Fi module. For example, we couldn’t use Intel’s x86 microprocessors because they can accept firmware updates that we cannot debug or inspect. Instead we chose an ARM-based Freescale i.MX6 system-on-a-chip, which has no such updatable code embedded. (A system-on-a-chip, or SoC, is similar to a microprocessor except it has more of the supporting hardware, such as memory and peripheral interfaces, needed to make a complete computer.) The i.MX6 does have some code burned into it to coordinate the computer’s boot-up process, but this firmware can’t be changed, and its unencrypted binary code can be read out and analyzed for possible security problems.

I'm confused. They claim the open source requirement prevented them from going with an intel chip, but then they say the reason why was because intel could push firmware updates. Furthermore, the Freescale SoC has firmware built in, but it's not open source.

Is this what we consider open source these days? Sure, a good whitepaper is nice, but it's not open source. Don't get me wrong, this is still nice effort on the open front, but calling this a "laptop with no secrets" seems like a stretch.

mmastrac2• 11 years ago

Intel firmware is obfuscated, closed-source and very low-level which means that it could be running nearly anything -- you don't know what it is.

The SoC has closed-source blobs, but it's all debugging and reversible which is not as good as OSS, but not as bad as opaque blobs from Intel.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

I really can't wait for the first fully open down to the metal system. A few arm cores, a few vulcan-ish gpu cores, optional fpga. Just nice compute power easy to tap into for oss devs.

ps: I shouldn't have written ARM, I meant simple ARM-like ISA (from what I understand it's way smaller than x86).

kawsper2• 11 years ago

People are afraid of the Intel Management Engine, and you can read about it here: http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel

It is a dense and very detailed text, but basically your Intel CPU contains Active Management Technology (AMT) which lets remote users control your computer, which may or may not be what you want, and there might be backdoors hiding here.

It also includes Intel Boot Guard, which prevents users from installing their own firmware (such as libreboot and coreboot) because it needs to be signed with a key from Intel.

The page sums it up like this:

In summary, the Intel Management Engine and its applications are a backdoor with total access to and control over the rest of the PC. The ME is a threat to freedom, security, and privacy, and the libreboot project strongly recommends avoiding it entirely. Since recent versions of it can't be removed, this means avoiding all recent generations of Intel hardware.

voltagex_• 11 years ago

I've asked a couple of times here, but I haven't had an answer:

I've got an X1 carbon where the vPro/AMT/ME setup screen doesn't load (CTRL+P on boot does nothing, missing UEFI binary?). Can I still activate it in Linux for my own purposes?

jakeogh• 11 years ago

Also see Joanna Rutkowska's recent paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10458318 (fun reading).

xobs5• 11 years ago

The theory is that the boot firmware is executed with the MMU off, and then jumps to your code and is done. Unless you specifically call into ROM, it just sits there unused.

Now it could be that there is some hardcoded exception handler in the memory controller that jumps to a specific area of ROM when a certain instruction is hit, and that causes exfiltration of data. But to do that would require a lot of separate components interacting, including ones that Freescale doesn't have access to (i.e. the A9 RTL, and possibly the PL-310 and the memory controller) and would require Freescale put the data exfiltration routine in ROM, or maybe there's an exfiltration routine hardcoded into the PL-310, in which case I wonder how they actually get data out of the machine.

As you say, that firmware can't be changed. It can be read out and analyzed for possible security problems, and I hope someone does that. The code is mostly concerned with validating signed boot images for "secure boot" where manufacturers don't want third-party firmwares to be used. It checks the firmware signature / decrypts the firmware using a key burned into OTP fuse bits. Novena doesn't use fuse bits, and in fact doesn't even blow the "boot source" fuses, meaning you're free to change the boot source from internal SD to external SD to SSD to booting from USB.

You can actually blow the fuses yourself and load a key known only to you, which means only you can sign firmware that it'll boot.

nascentmind2• 11 years ago

xobs, What was your experience working with the CPU vendors to open up the ROM or atleast provide a method to by pass the ROM and use an external ROM?

rsync• 11 years ago

"Instead we chose an ARM-based Freescale i.MX6 system-on-a-chip, which has no such updatable code"

Genuinely curious ... in a previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10458318

ARM chips with special "9th cores" were discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459158

Do ARM based Freescale chips, like the i.MX6, have "features" like this ?

nickpsecurity14• 11 years ago

It's not a laptop with no secrets or fully open-sourced. There's the hardware components internal operation, the FPGA tools, and so on that need to be open. Incidentally, the things with the biggest risk, too. Freescale operates DOD-certified fabs in U.S. on top of it with major sales to U.S. govt. Whatever subversion risk Intel poses we must assume Freescale does as well.

It's actually a laptop for FPGA hackers with incremental steps in the direction of an open-source laptop. That's great. That they made FPGA development a bit easier plus made a more open laptop is extra great. So, let's give them props they deserve while acknowledging it's still untrustworthy hardware and there's plenty of ways to go.

JoachimS7• 11 years ago

You don't need to use the FPGA to use the Novena, it is a peripheral you could even remove (albeit it would be hard since its a BGA).

The tool chain for the FPGA is proprietary and a black box. There are some reverse engineering efforts, but hard to do any meaningful. By and large, open HW is in a fairly sorry state. Most users seem to think zero cost is good enough.

nickpsecurity14• 11 years ago

I know. I'm just assuming FPGA is trusted in TCB, esp with DMA, plus implying many people will want to use it. Your assessment of open HW is accurate. Far as FPGA's, there's progress on several fronts. Some for you to check out that your people might even consider using given the continual payoff of a FPGA w/out high unit costs.

Open-source FPGA architecture at 45nm http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43...

Open-source bitstream generation for Xilinx w/out EULA violation or R.E. (!?) http://www.isi.edu/~nsteiner/publications/soni-2013-bitstrea...

Open tools for Lattice http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

Open-source HW synthesis flow http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/

Note: Cliff is on a winning streak, eh?

I recently did a write-up showing what it could or would take at both ASIC and production levels here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468534

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468624

So, paths are clear and plenty of potential. Just no uptake. Will take government, corporate, or private sponsors working with academic (low NRE) and professional (experienced) HW designers that open-source stuff as they go. Proprietary, dual-licensed OSS is the only way to go for HW that I know of.

nickpsecurity14• 11 years ago

Curious, what's your level of HW development experience for FPGA's JoachimS? I'm keeping my eye out for people who might put high-level synthesis tools I spot through their paces. There's two that I think haven't got much review but have potential.

SomeCallMeTim• 11 years ago

It kills me that it has no working GPU. :(

I found the wording about XFce to be weird: They claimed to not use Ubuntu because they needed XFce, but ...

http://xubuntu.org/

dikaiosune• 11 years ago

Xubuntu's Xfce is weird, and heavily changed from upstream, last time I tried using it. Broken themes, incompatible panel applets, etc.

JoachimS7• 11 years ago

A GPU is actually one of the things you could use the FPGA for fairly easy. The question is if you could gain any serious performance benefits though.

The CPU cores runs at 1.2 GHz, for reliable transfer you want to run the EIM interface at 66 MHz. You could potentially run the GPU at something like 100 MHz in the Spartan6.

That is a 10x difference compared to the CPU. So your GPU must provide more than 10x compared to SW to be useful. Not taking parallel processing into account though.

xobs5• 11 years ago

The GPU is being worked on. The Mesa driver is being worked on as we speak by a number of people including rmk and jnettlet, with austriancoder's experimental repo located at https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1. If you want to get technical, we already have fully open-source 2D acceleration, and we routinely use the 2D GPU to e.g. do colorspace conversion and 2D scaling on video.

I went with Debian because we knew some Debian people. At one point I considered moving to Ubuntu, because they package "Firefox" and "Thunderbird" (instead of rebranding them) and they have Chromium as well. There were lots of teething problems, though, ranging from their Xorg modesetting driver refusing to use generic KMS on a non-PCI system, to strange oddities when no initrd was present, to the desktop straight-up crashing when logging in (turns out Unity assumes GL is present and has no fallback.) Ubuntu seems to make many assumptions about running on standard x86 hardware, and was rough around the edges. We could have polished it, but it seemed easier to stick with Debian.

brbsix• 11 years ago

It currently says "We couldn’t use the popular Ubuntu and RedHat distributions because they basically require GPU hardware acceleration". Ubuntu uses Unity (graphical shell for GNOME desktop environment). Unity is very graphics intensive and has a number of other drawbacks. Xubuntu is derived from Ubuntu but uses XFCE desktop environment and has a companion suite of lightweight applications.

pjc506• 11 years ago

This whole thread should be cited on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

Fully open hardware is never going to be quite as achievable as open source software because the manufacturing and distribution costs cannot be driven to zero in the same way. Furthermore, ASICs can't be rebuilt by the end user in the same way as software. You're always going to be dependent on a device coming out of someone else's factory.

Openness remains a minority interest, and therefore the NRE cost amortized in every unit is going to be higher. Signs of people being willing to pay for open hardware (the original designers who did the development, not the cloners who didn't) are scarce.

And when someone does offer something like this to the community, what do they get? Negativity.

It's not even an unachievable amount of money that would be required to do a fully open CPU+GPU by paid professionals. $10m at the bottom end. Much smaller than, say, the Star Citizen kickstarter. What's unachievable is the community unity of purpose behind it.

sneak• 11 years ago

It's not negativity; it's a practical analysis of the fact that the project failed to achieve its singular purpose. He even acknowledges the effort and that it's a good incremental step; but a verifiable computer it is not.

nickpsecurity14• 11 years ago

"perfect is the enemy of good"

"And when someone does offer something like this to the community, what do they get? Negativity."

Irrelevant: nobody suggested perfection. Matter of fact, all I suggested was for the project to deliver on its stated goal or articles on it modify their statements to reflect reality. Many projects accurately portray their capabilities without financial incentive at all. So, I'm sure this one can, too.

"Fully open hardware is never going to be quite as achievable as open source software because the manufacturing and distribution costs cannot be driven to zero in the same way. "

Fully open hardware has been achieved many times. It just hasn't been achieved at the desktop or laptop level. QED.

"Openness remains a minority interest, and therefore the NRE cost amortized in every unit is going to be higher. Signs of people being willing to pay for open hardware (the original designers who did the development, not the cloners who didn't) are scarce."

Now you have a real problem. You have to get the costs down or just drop the goal entirely.

"It's not even an unachievable amount of money that would be required to do a fully open CPU+GPU by paid professionals. $10m at the bottom end. Much smaller than, say, the Star Citizen kickstarter. What's unachievable is the community unity of purpose behind it."

It's actually easier than you think. All it would take are a number of academic teams, probably less than 10, using their discounted tools and grant money to each produce re-usable parts of a SOC on good process node (eg 45nm CMOS). Think USB, DDR, cache, etc. They've already produced a processor (Rocket RISC-V @ 1.4GHz) and many DSP-style chips up to 160+ cores that can be licensed. Remaining pieces are small plus SOC integration and testing with tooling.

I explained all this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468534

Using academics for as many projects as possible keeps the EDA, MPW, and labor costs low. They can just public domain everything they build or cheaply license it to commercial projects to fund further development. In it for them is job/tool experience. In just a few years, we'd have every major component we need. Then, a private company (or another academic team) could put it together as SOC leveraging tools they already bought with funding from their own operations, Kickstarter, grant money, private donors, whatever. Many funding models.

So, far from an impossibility, there's multiple paths to get to the SOC's, DSP's, or FPGA's needed for open-source HW. A good chunk of it is already built, some open-sourced, and some just described in papers with enough detail to copy. There's teams all over the world with skills, tools, and funding that can be motivated to do it. So, enough excuses: start cold calling on them. :)

And things like Novena can present themselves accurately in meantime as huge, black-boxes from scheming companies that are connected together in an open-source way. Seeing it that way, though, might make people concerned with their security less likely to buy it. Re-purposed embedded boards are probably a lot safer. :)

skaevola• 11 years ago

Freescale's fabs in the U.S. are all very old (like early 1990's old). AFAIK they only manufacture analog and MEMS type stuff there. I think TSMC manufactures their MCU, MPU's, and most other digital electronics. This is the 'fab-lite' model.

nickpsecurity14• 11 years ago

Thanks for the info. I'll try to double-check mine on that. :)

nextos• 11 years ago

We need a cheap general purpose Novena-like laptop.

I'd argue a really good place to start from is a custom Rockchip machine (like Asus C201, which is now supported by Libreboot). Add a free GPU (or finish the Lima driver) and we are ready to go.

snvzz• 11 years ago

I'm hoping this is the start of a trend.

The true start will be once the lowrisc SoC is out, and open hardware devices using it start to flood the market.

erronjason• 11 years ago

It's sad that it's been 25+ years in the making to finally get something sort of okay, and even then it's ridiculously expensive by contrast of closed source. Why can't we have something thinkpad-like for the cost? Don't they know they'd make metric craptons of money on something like that?

chadzawistowski• 11 years ago

You might be looking for the Libreboot X200, a FSF-approved refurbished Thinkpad X200.

http://minifree.org/product/libreboot-x200/

mtw• 11 years ago

all out of stock?

cwyers• 11 years ago

Don't they know they'd make metric craptons of money on something like that?

They would? Thinkpad margins aren't that great to begin with (which is why IBM sold the business off to Lenovo). So now take out every high-volume, low cost component in there and replace it with something less popular. Because you no longer have those economies of scale you don't have the best fabs so the thermal profile of everything in there sucks, so you have to find some way to put the thing in a lap without causing permanent damage. And then you're marketing the thing to the users of the third-most-popular desktop OS, where the breakdown of market share is something like 90/8/2. But then not to users of the most popular desktop Linux distro, or even the top 10 most popular Linux distros, to the people who use stuff like Gnusense.

Where's the metric crapton of money?

zhemao4• 11 years ago

In the original blog post for the project, they explicitly anticipated this complaint and stated that this simply wasn't their goal. Novena is not intended to be a mass market Thinkpad clone, it is a laptop made by OSHW hackers for OSHW hackers. Hence why it includes an FPGA and plenty of GPIO pins.

dingaling• 11 years ago

I wouldn't say it's a laptop; there is no integrated keyboard and the screen faces out when closed, so it is unsuitable for transport.

It's a small portable computer that is probably underpowered for everyday general-purpose use.

Vexs• 11 years ago

I've been following the Novena since it's conception, it's a neat idea, and even though it's not 100% open source, it's closer than everything else we have. And the fact that you can just build hardware ontop of what's already there due to the FPGA and massive IO bus is downright neat. They've already demonstrated stuff like an oscilloscope.

Also, Bunnie is a very cool guy, his blog is a wealth of information on hardware design, and Chinese manufacturing process. If anyone can make a laptop that has every component open source, it's him. might take time, but hey.

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

As someone who bought Bunnie's Hacking The Xbox book many moons ago, it's been enjoyable to follow along project after project.

chaostheory• 11 years ago

Good to know that he's working on something new post Chumbie

chatman2• 11 years ago

It looks terrible. These are the kinds of machines that bring bad name to the concept of free/open source hardware. Nothing that is the fault of Bunnie, but something that reflects a sad reality.

avmich2• 11 years ago

This is a machine for early adopters - not the followers.

chatman2• 11 years ago

The sad part is that we are talking about "early" adoption with just 2 months to go for 2016!

tdicola• 11 years ago

I'm sure people said the Apple I looked ugly too. That didn't stop it from revolutionizing home computing.

Yaggo• 11 years ago

It's about priorities. This [small budget] project priorities open source hw/sw, not industrial design. Good industrial design isn't cheap, easy nor comes for free.

vlehto• 11 years ago

I think its more about people.

I'd love to work for something like this. I might not even need money for it. But I would not do it just to "sleek up this box", I would want to take part in the design process. (Or some money. I can do boring stuff with salary.)

1. These people probably don't know anybody like me.

2. Nobody wants to give away decision power when it's about their pet project.

mikekchar2• 11 years ago

Glass-half-full-guy here. Free software, as a movement, started in the early 80's. Writing free software is incredibly easy because you need only a bare minimum of building blocks. Also once the initial tool set is built, anyone can join with virtually no cost to entry (for example, if you had emacs and GCC binaries and a computer capable of running them, you could participate in free software).

Free hardware is completely different. You have to rely on other organizations all the way down the chain. And even if you manage to build a tool set to build something, it's not like anyone else can simply copy it and get started. They end up having almost the same struggle that you did.

Consider as well how long it took for the free software view point to become acceptable to mainstream thinking. Even today, almost 2016, there are huge populations of programmers who think free software is crazy. But now there are companies built on free software with near billion dollar valuations, and other companies mostly built with free software that are in the many-billions-of-dollars of valuation. The concept has gotten over the hump, though it was a huge struggle for decades (and it continues to be necessary to make sure that legislation doesn't take our freedom away).

Software was crazily hard. Hardware is nigh on impossible. And yet, they have accomplished this! It's not sad, it's amazing!

I understand that you wish that the world was made up in a way that would make free hardware easy, but it's not. It never will be. It will take the concerted effort of dedicated pioneers to drag it into the consciousness of the masses. I suppose it is sad that it isn't easier in the same way that it is sad that it doesn't occasionally rain candy instead of raindrops. But that is no reason to be disappointed.

aij• 11 years ago

Why didn't they use an open source CPU? Eg: OpenSPARC

avmich2• 11 years ago

May be they wanted good speed, freedom from particularly complicated FPGAs, and not to have to order chips as ASICs?.. I'd like to know too; this could be a good thing to have.

xobs5• 11 years ago

Aside from the fact that we're familiar with Freescale and ARM, many other chips we "could have used" are unobtanium. While it's true that there is a source-level implementation, I can't find any T1 or T2 parts available for purchase. It's the same reason why we went with an A9 instead of an A15 or a 64-bit chip: You just can't buy them unless you're a big company. And if a small two-person company can't buy them, how can we claim it's open source hardware if you can't buy them either?

The other possibility would be to fab a chip ourselves, but that's a whole other order of magnitude in terms of cost and complexity, and the result isn't that great in terms of speed and available peripherals. Plus, when you fab a chip like this a lot of the hardware blocks are IP provided by the chip foundry, e.g. flash controllers and DRAM cells, and those are always closed-source. It just moves the whole thing one turtle down.

renox2• 11 years ago

Because you can't buy (1) an OpenSPARC?

1:for a reasonable amount of money, paying for a custom ASIC is quite expensive.

mfincham• 11 years ago

I have one of these machines and it's been great fun so far to hack on. The development process and the continuing work of the community has been great to be a part of.

akhilcacharya• 11 years ago

I like the project, but I'm not a fan of the designs they're going with for the first run - I'd prefer a model more similar to the one they first teased a few years ago, if only in terms of form factor [1]

[1] http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Open...

nosuchthing• 11 years ago

I'd guess the first model case would be more expensive to manufacture, and the current model they've chosen is more 'modular' and adaptable to ad hoc engineering situations?

xobs5• 11 years ago

There were a few issues with that design. One was that we never really got hinges working. I bought some friction hinges, but couldn't settle on a way to attach them. The temporary bodge was to 3D print some chucks with an angle on them to use.

The other was that it was difficult to get past airport security. The German agents seemed to at least appreciate that we'd built a laptop that we can trust.

Finally, it was nigh impossible to access things like the FPGA and the serial ports. I find myself using GPIOs all the time to do things like bitbang SWD, and being able to do that by reaching around the screen is handy, not to mention being able to mount the thing being debugged under SWD directly in the case, so it's much easier to take with me.

scott_karana2• 11 years ago

How in the world does a SMART-compatible Samsung SSD not have secrets?

Did they never read any of Snowden's leaks? :(

https://www.google.ca/search?q=nsa+hard+drive+firmware

adj_• 11 years ago

It seems that you don't know that they are aware about the topic. In fact they proved the possibility of running arbitrary code on some sdcards' microcontroller:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

scott_karana2• 11 years ago

Well, I read through the entire article and despite the detailed attention lavished on CPUs and GPUs, there was not a single mention of their disk's security.

It's disappointing that if they are "aware" of the problem, they didn't mention it to their audience in an article about their device's security, don't you think?

eccstartup• 11 years ago

1. Open does not mean ugly.

2. C'est trop cher!

3. Is it a manually-capsuled desktop-style laptop?

4. Is it light enough to carry?

5. Where can I get one?

pjmlp• 11 years ago

Nice effort, but software rendering is a no go in 2015.

ekianjo• 11 years ago

The expression "GNU/Linux is a special version of Linux" sounds a big strange to me. GNU/Linux is an actual OS, not a version of the Linux kernel. That's really the wrong way to explain things.

vog• 11 years ago

Maybe this was meant to distinguish GNU/Linux from other Linux userlands, such as Android?

Apart from that, for the layman "Linux" is generally understood as the whole Linux distribution, not just the kernel or the OS.

Still, even from that perspective this wording is quite confusing.

mikekchar2• 11 years ago

Yes. It would have been nice to say something like, "We decided not to use Android. -- insert reasons for not using Android here --. Android uses a kernel called Linux that interfaces with the hardware. Instead we went with GNU on top of a Linux kernel". It makes it clear what's actually happening. If you've seen an Android machine and a GNU/Linux machine, then you can easily understand what Android and GNU provide on top of Linux.

Still, I was happy to see the comparison even if it was slightly misleading.

acd• 11 years ago

I´m looking for a laptop that is easy to repair and has open source hardware.

Preferably there would be something like the ITX standard for laptops with different standard designs. Like a ultra book, notebook and different screen sizes. If there was standardized screen you could easily repair your laptop.

All hardware should be open. The firmware should be open with known checksums. Open boot loader. Open source operating system.

All components should be upgradable so that once the laptop speed wise is obsolete by moores law it should be easy to dissamble and recyle the materials. Further you should be able to reuse components which does not age that fast as the cpu and mainboard, for example the keyboard, mouse and display.

We throw a lot of electronic garbage, that ends up being exported to cheap scrap yards in China and Africa, this needs to change if we do not want a junk yard planet.

ymse• 11 years ago

Fairphone is doing something similar with their upcoming phone. Although the hardware is not open. They should talk with OP.

https://www.fairphone.com/phone/

reirob• 11 years ago

Thanks for sharing. Just looked on their site, but can't see when the Fairphone 2 will be coming and what other OSes it will be able to run additionally to Android 5.1. Any idea?

pjc506• 11 years ago

What %age extra are you prepared to pay for this?

kriro• 11 years ago

Interesting, never heard of this before. I have backed a pitop on indigogo with the plan of switching out the pi for a beaglebone to get closer to all open components.

Very cool project :)

theallan• 11 years ago

Possibly slightly off topic, and not something I would normally comment on, but wow - what a lot of adverts! Desktop browser and aside from the full screen ad you need to click through on load, about 3/5 of the screen is adverts.

I've been torturing myself over the idea of having a single banner ad on my site (decided not to for now), but this is something that makes me want to finally give up and install an adblocker.

Novena: A Laptop with No Secrets

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