China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture 240
MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
Those (Score:2, Informative)
Always open backdoors work both ways... once discovered.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean "a dictatorial autocratic oligarchic country." Or something like that, possibly proto-fascist considering how closely linked their corporations and government officials are. China isn't communist by any stretch of the imagination, and the spying and censorship is purely for the purpose of keeping The Party in power, whatever the cost to the people.
Re:my question is (Score:5, Informative)
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
As the summary surmises, a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying.
FTFA
...a ubiquitous, always-open backdoor that can be used by Chinese intelligence agencies. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easy to circumvent — but what if China built a DNS and IP address blacklist into the hardware itself?
This is utter and complete nonsense. There is hardly a shread of logic in making this argument.
It is an instruction set. You know, add register 1 to register 12 and store in register 1. Copy Register 1 to memory location 0xa3546f00. Things like that. In what world could an instruction set and basic outline for the architechure (which is the system built around the core instruction set. Memory interfaces, cache rules, chip to chip protocols, etc etc) be capable of a backdoor?
Built in blacklist of IP addresses? How does that work? Blacklist an entire subset of the 32 and 128 bit integers? Good luck running the system! I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to try and predict the failure mode of there. Some others later inthe thread are talking about this making it easier for black hats by way of making their code portable. Portable code does make their job easier, but that doesn't make the system built on the ISA identical. It also doesn't make the chips themselves identical. A flaw in one chip or one system built on this ISA does not affect the others. Flaws that are within the spec itself are harder to fix but are no more a risk than any other ISA.
There isn't a logical way for an ISA to be exploited for the kinds of things people are talking about. Even if they did, say, hide some nonvolitile storage on certain chips and try to identify AES being performed (for example) and store the keys away it would be trivial to obfuscate the AES code so it wasn't recognized. There are a near infinite number of ways to perform an arbitrary transformation on data, some are just used because they are faster and resistant to things like timing attacks.
To cut this short: anyone making arguments against a standardized ISA by way of invoking security concerns needs to really lay out their argument. I can't concieve of one good path of attack but I think I'm biased against the idea. If someone can provide a good and thought out example I'd be glad to hear it but I suspect that the security angle isn't a valid concern.