[Cryptography] The Crypto Pi

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 01/12/2015 10:32 PM, Bill Frantz wrote:
>
> I have both boards, and I can think of advantages for both of them. 
> When Both are based on "Systems on a Chip" (SOC), which have the CPU, 
> memory, and all the controllers on one chip. I think they were both 
> designed for set top boxes.
>
> I went to get the hardware manual for the Broadcom based Raspberry PI, 
> their web site said, "Contact our sales department." When I went to 
> the Texas Instruments site for the Beaglebone, I downloaded an almost 
> 5000 page PDF.
>
> As for hardware Trojans, I think your attacker here is more likely to 
> be the MPAA than the NSA, but I certainly could be wrong.
>
> Cheers - Bill
Newer GPU cards for the X86 world have little TEEs tucked into the 
corner to do MPAAs bidding, in a sense.  It allows you to do "secure" 
stream
   decrypt+decode right on the graphics card, with just enough obscure 
dancing-about to make it "difficult" to be attacked by the legit owner of
   the hardware--the decrypted stream never appears in the PC memory 
space, where it's easiest to siphon.

I worked on software related to that nonsense at my current company, but 
never actually laid my hands on the hardware.  The "industry" calls this
   "Media-Path Protection".

Anyway, I have no idea if ARM SOC graphics/GPU subsystems have adopted a 
similar model or not.  And many models of ARM have a TEE built in to
   them, which nearly-nobody takes any advantage of.

Also, with the introduction of the Odroid C1, the rPI has a very-serious 
competitor at the $35.00 price range.  I have a trio of them at the moment,
   and they're quite nice.