[Cryptography] RISC-V isn't the answer

[Tony Arcieri]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 6:05 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

> Ok, so I've reviewed a number of discussions of
> the RISC-V architecture, and my conclusion is that
> RISC-V isn't going to be a "silver bullet" for
> high security & privacy applications.
>

Why?


> Although RISC-V was a "clean sheet" design in
> 2011 (?), a lot of water has gone under the
> bridge since then (cough, Snowden, cough),
>

So FUD?


> I don't believe that RISC-V adequately
> addresses all of the side-channel issues that
> have been discovered in the mean time.
>

Which sidechannel issues? If you're alluding to Meltdown and Spectre,
RISC-V isn't vulnerable to either, because no RISC-V core supports
speculative execution yet (the closest thing is the BOOMv2 core, which only
does out-of-order execution)

There are, of course, numerous other potential sidechannels, from DPA to
EM. These attacks require physical access and aren't remotely exploitable
like Meltdown/Spectre. Any chip which isn't specifically designed to resist
them is almost certainly vulnerable, but that's a different threat model.

The important point about RISC-V with regard to Meltdown and Spectre is the
RISC-V architecture is a major research testbed, they are just starting to
look at speculative execution now, and now have the opportunity of 20/20
hindsight. They also have designs with great memory protection
architectures already in place (lowRISC).
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