Beyond the secure boot, this is really cool<p>"...Titan cryptographically associates the log messages with successive values of a secure monotonic counter maintained by Titan, and signs these associations with its private key. This binding of log messages with secure monotonic counter values ensures that audit logs cannot be altered or deleted without detection, even by insiders with root access to the relevant machine."
Pardon my ignorance in hardware matters, but I would assume Google gets these manufactured via a third-party.<p>What would be the process for verifying that the chip itself has not been compromised during manufacture?<p>Is this a hardware + software verification combo, so a tainted chip would not be recognized as valid by the software - so you'd need to compromise both to bypass?
The red circuit board/chip image in the article is not of the actual chip. May I see it?<p>The caption reads, "Photograph of Titan up-close on a printed circuit board", which is unfortunately untrue:<p><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-027iovJ94yk/WZ8ZDw4MNvI/AAAAAAAAEUM/LHjr4KnsLjw-L5owy2RJinEC2VqdIbECACLcBGAs/s1600/titan-1.png" rel="nofollow">https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-027iovJ94yk/WZ8ZDw4MNvI/AAAAAAAAE...</a>
I've heard about this chip, but I still don't get what specific scenarios it's designed to prevent compared to "traditional" secure boot. The article lists a lot of things Titan does without going into what practical benefits all of those features offer compared to the current industry practices.
News like this make me sad. google is becoming a government agency-like customised fortress from the cold war, and general computing gets phased out, just like Cory Doctorow said.[^1]
Technologically, it's fantastic, but I do not welcome the philosophy it's bringing.<p>[^1]: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/18/on-the-war-on-general-purpose-computing/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/18/on-the-war-on-general-purp...</a>