Increasingly, what we call the processor on our computers and phones is actually a System on Chip (SoC) – that is to say, the processor is coupled with other elements such as integrated graphics, connectivity (ie PCIe) or other management functions. What do we really know about the hardware underlying modern computers?

Vulnerabilities found in subsystems such as those in the firmware of the Intel Management Engine (ME) found in most modern computers reveal a blunt truth – we have to trust, blindly or begrudgingly, that our chips are correctly implemented and without any backdoors, intentional or otherwise.

In this presentation, we take a look at how the hardware manufacturing ecosystem impacts the security of the devices we use. We also present a computer design whose processor is implemented in a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based on the open source RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), as well as the toolkits available for synthesizing digital hardware.