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posted by janrinok on Sunday June 22 2014, @07:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the chipski dept.

Announced shortly after the 1 year anniversary of the first revelations by Eric Snowden that American spy agencies have their fingers in everything, the Russian government will be funding a project to build a custom microprocessor. Codenamed Baikal (after the lake with Earth's largest volume of fresh water), it will be built around an ARM Cortex A57, a 64-bit architecture running at 2GHz. No core count or other details are available. First deliveries are expected in 2015.

The ARM architecture aligns with Vladimir Putin's goal, announced in 2010, to move all government computers onto Linux. It also comes in the wake of another large country's recent barring of some American technology in favor of a homegrown Linux distro.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by middlemen on Sunday June 22 2014, @08:22PM

    by middlemen (504) on Sunday June 22 2014, @08:22PM (#58787) Homepage

    Now we actually get the CHOICE of to whom we're gonna be sending our data.

    You're now going to be sending your data to your own country as opposed to someone else. That is being in a better position in some regards.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 22 2014, @10:36PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 22 2014, @10:36PM (#58815) Journal

    The processor is the least of your worries in this regard.

    Switching from X86 to Arm offers no improvement with regard to security, other than the fact that they can license ARM easier, and build their own chips. That will take them several years.

    In the meantime, just doing their own Linux/BSD will give them as much protection at far less cost.

    However, unless they manufacture the entire machine, they are as likely to find a backdoor in a network card as in a processor. Both of these possibilities are better managed by by strict egress filtering by an upstream boxes.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by cafebabe on Monday June 23 2014, @01:32AM

      by cafebabe (894) on Monday June 23 2014, @01:32AM (#58841) Journal

      Switching from X86 to Arm offers no improvement with regard to security

      That's not true. Increased instruction word length hinders some buffer overflow attacks. In the case of x86, it is possible to transform code into seven bit clean ASCII, get it past some cases of validation code and then perform a buffer overflow. This is much harder to achieve when instruction word size is 16 bits or 32 bits because fewer instructions are valid. In the case of 8 bit instructions, 37% of one byte instructions are printable 7 bit ASCII. 14% of 16 bit instructions are valid and 1.9% of 32 bit instructions are valid. A similar principle applies for UTF-8 filtering.

      The downside is that longer instruction word length is harder and slower to emulate. That's a contributing factor to the dominance of x86 binaries but it shouldn't be mistaken as an equal or better solution.

      --
      1702845791×2
      • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday June 23 2014, @09:24AM

        by Dunbal (3515) on Monday June 23 2014, @09:24AM (#58927)

        If only you could use an operating system that was written in a way that handles buffers properly eliminating buffer overflow attacks altogether. Oh wait -

        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday June 24 2014, @10:55AM

          by cafebabe (894) on Tuesday June 24 2014, @10:55AM (#59326) Journal

          The solution to buffer overflows is to never handle variable length data on a stack. The proper place for variable length data is a heap where it can then be attacked with heap overflows.

          Obviously, I'm being facetious but I find it odd that it is easier to check buffer overflows at runtime through the use of guard values (gcc compile option -fstack-protector) rather than check buffer overflows and heap overflows at compile time.

          --
          1702845791×2
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Monday June 23 2014, @09:12AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday June 23 2014, @09:12AM (#58923)

      > Switching from X86 to Arm offers no improvement with regard to security

      A lot of US military gear has ARM chips in it. Which means that if there are any backdoors, the NSA believes they're unbreakable by potential enemies.
      Considering their normal paranoia, that's supposed to mean that there aren't backdoors (unless the GCHQ is hiding something from the NSA).
      And yes, the NSA does get to veto which chip you're going to put in military gear.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 23 2014, @10:58PM

        by frojack (1554) on Monday June 23 2014, @10:58PM (#59162) Journal

        Yeah right.

        I distinctly remember seeing General Schwarzkopf standing in front a huge room full of computers running windows xp inside the command tents during the invasion of Kuwait.
        They got so much flak about trusting XP that by the time they invaded Iraq nobody was allowed in the tents anymore. Lot of good that did.

        A lot of gear has arm for power usage requirements only.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2014, @07:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23 2014, @07:29AM (#58900)

    You're now going to be sending your data to your own country as opposed to someone else. That is being in a better position in some regards.

    And worse in some other places. Many people in the world should worry a lot more about their own government than some other country's government*. Some random person who stays in Russia and never goes to the USA is unlikely to have as much to fear personally from the NSA/CIA/etc than from the Russian FSB. Similar for some random person in China.

    * While it is true that everyone should be concerned about the governments of countries that have a large number of nukes - that danger isn't a "personal thing". They're not going to nuke you and your country just because of your "actual tax position" or your stash of illegal drugs/weapons/porn/movies, seditious materials. But these might cause you problems with your own government.