The Least Annoying of All Evils
If you missed the hubbub this week, it was found that the Raspberry Pi Foundation added code within the firmware that locks the boot course of up if non-original RAM chips are detected onboard. Hot-rodding your Pi is a time-honored tradition in these parts. We do marvel simply what number of people are taking the chance of hot-airing the reminiscence off the board, versus paying the additional money to get one with extra RAM. But in accordance with Raspberry Pi, sufficient boards are exhibiting up which have the RAM surreptitiously changed, and infrequently faulty, that they took the step to lock the machine down.
Should customers be alerted to doubtlessly unscrupulous conduct by the businesses promoting them single-board computer systems? I feel we’d all say “positive”. But ought to that completely brick the system? And forestall individuals from upgrading their very own? The hacker in me says “no”. Is there any technique to reconcile these two? Our personal [Arya Voronova] means that it’s no large deal to flash an older model of the preliminary firmware, and we concur, though it does depart behind all of the enhancements since 2023, and it’ll solely get much less recent as time goes by.
How to announce that the board has non-factory reminiscence with out breaking it? [Jeff Geerling] instructed a non-matching-memory bit that customers might examine, however then they may additionally neglect to examine. My cellphone has a display that seems each bootup, and requires me to press the ability button to proceed, as a result of I rooted the cellphone and put in an open-source OS. It’s a trouble for positive, but it surely’s lots higher than bricking the cellphone or disallowing consumer firmware completely.
Doing the identical factor for the Raspberry Pi isn’t as simple. You by no means know what, if any, peripherals are related, so you’ll be able to’t assure that there’s a display to warn you and even essentially a keyboard on which you possibly can acknowledge. We’re reminded of an analogous scenario with FTDI USB-to-serial converter chips ages in the past. Their driver software program merely refused to work with counterfeit variations of their chips. Hackers had been up in arms, largely as a result of we couldn’t know if the components had been real at buy time, and the counterfeits had been extensively distributed even by dependable resellers.
So what about it? Can you suppose up a tamper-evident sign that might run on boot on a Raspberry Pi, possibly a headless system put in in some difficult-to-reach place? Maybe ideally the equal of the mobile phone’s scare message? It must be onerous to miss, however hold the machine operating, notifying the consumer that issues aren’t kosher, however not stopping them from attending to work. Sounds like a tall order to us.
