Round-Table Discusses RISC-V, FOSSi Impact On Hardware Security

Semiconductor Engineering’s Ed Sperling has published extracts of a round-table with Rambus’ Helena Handschuh, Microsemi’s Richard Newell, and Galois’ Joseph Kiniry on the impact the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) can have on security.
“With open source, you have the opportunity to review it and come up with comments, feed it back to the community, and as a group you can advance maybe not faster but better,” explains Handschuh. “You have more hands. Everybody is available to give you constructive comments, and then you can work together to make it better. That means you start from something that is open and published, and then you evolve it together by adding things and creating white papers.
“We will have [security] issues with RISC-V, as well, and it will be hard to change the hardware. But globally we’re better off because we all learn from each other how to make it better, so that the next time around we can improve. Making things open and public always will help, rather than waiting until someone actually finds a problem and then nobody knows how to fix it.”
 
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