Finding Hardware Flaws with Laura Abbott

Welcome Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer!

• Laura will be giving a talk at the upcoming Hardwear.io conference in Santa Clara about the (second!) vulnerability she found in the LPC55S69
• Oxide servers are built to be secure from the ground up.
• Root of trust
• The vulnerability Laura found was a buffer overflow in the firmware update mechanism of the LPC55S69.
• TPM
• Cortex M33
• Trust Zone M
• Service Processor - baseband management controller
• What does a server board look like?
• Power management
• Their customer Root of Trust OS is called Hubris
• Open compute project
• Many of the projects at Oxide are programmed in Rust (programming language)
• Memory unsafe stuff
• How do you know rust will run on a part? You can see if there is a "crate" available for the part (Rust installer/package manager)
• Writing updates for processors
• How often does firmware get update on servers?
• Host processor talks to management network onboard, it delivers firmware images to the lower layers.
• What is a Root of Trust task that it might do on a daily basis?
• Laura explained some of the challenges of working remote on hardware
• Laura moved from software into security/hardware. Perviously she had been doing kernel development.
• She is still a Technical Advisory Board Member at the Linux Foundation
• Getting started with kernel
• Follow Laura on Twitter at @openlabbott