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luxstyle | 10 years ago

Why is "environmentally friendly" an aspect of design here? Maybe industrial design but certainly not a factor in digital design.

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nickpsecurity|10 years ago

In security, environmentally friendly designs are almost always insecure. The reason is that you get all that low cost and energy through tons of integration/sharing. This introduces attacks from hardware emanation on up to software issues due to shared resources. The paradigm of both reliability and security is isolation of problems one can't prevent. Long story short, that leads to extra hardware in many forms. Means those systems will always use more space and energy.

Further, the stuff that's easier to verify and more diverse is on the older process nodes. They deliver less transistors and use more power in the same space. However, they're cheaper in mask costs, open-source tools can semi-handle them, still diverse in number of fabs, and easier to reverse engineer. So, once again, high confidence and low design/development cost = not environmentally friendly.

For high confidence systems, it's best to just forget about the environment entirely. As if those smartphones weren't manufactured from very polluting processes anyway. Their users are just as guilty: just more judgemental. ;)

nosuchthing|10 years ago

Curious, what areas or systems are sacrificing environmentally friendly choices for security choices?

sageikosa|10 years ago

Maybe all the pixels are recycled?