We need open source firmware

http://upon2020.com/blog/2015/02/we-need-open-source-firmware/

by jernst • 11 years ago

15 7 11 years ago

upon2020.com

greenyoda• 11 years ago

"nobody has ever bought (or not bought) a hard drive because of better firmware."

This may not be true for solid state drives, where the algorithms used in the firmware could significantly affect the performance, reliability and lifetime of the drive.

hga• 11 years ago

Maybe true in the consumer world, but Western Digital attempted to enter the SCSI enterprise market in the mid-late '90s and I'm told failed because their firmware's write speeds were not competitive compared to Seagate and IBM ... and they ended up buying the latter after it's disk division passed through Hitachi.

geoelectric• 11 years ago

I'd like to see open source firmware too.

But to the specific argument, wouldn't a reference hash of the blob and/or crypto signing be adequate to verify it's what was delivered?

cottonseed2• 11 years ago

Wouldn't full-disk encryption mitigate hard drive firmware attacks?

jlubawy• 11 years ago

FDE will not help in this case since it only encrypts user data written to the media. However, some of the higher-end HDD models have signed firmware support which renders firmware useless unless it is cryptographically signed by the manufacturer.

cottonseed2• 11 years ago

I don't understand this. If you're using FDE, how does the hacked firmware ever escape the drive?

jernst• 11 years ago

Something verifyable definitely would help, like with a checksum. But then, how do make sure that what you are verifying is actually what is running?

We need open source firmware

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