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Secure Boot on ESP32 Platforms

67 points| pdubouilh | 2 years ago |thistle.tech

17 comments

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ianlevesque|2 years ago

Informative, but if you’re building ordinary consumer hardware please don’t enable secure boot on your ESP32 device. There’s a thriving ecosystem of open source software (for example ESPHome) that gives flexibility to how a device is used and long term support long after your project or company has failed. We don’t need more electronic landfill rubbish when motivated individuals could tinker with them instead.

syncomo|2 years ago

Secure boot is a restriction put on a device, indeed. Whether secure boot should be enabled on a device or not depends on the perspective, and also on the threat model. For example, for an ESP32-based crypto wallet product like Jade (https://github.com/Blockstream/Jade) that's to be used to store Bitcoin, it's very likely a very good idea to enable secure boot, no matter it's an official or DIY device.

xnzakg|2 years ago

Came here to comment the same thing. I'm also personally not a fan of not being able to own your devices (or just not being able to keep them alive once the manufacturer turns off some server...), though there are two issues: One is people who buy IoT <thing> and then complain when it gets compromised because it was connected to the internet and someone somewhere found a way to turn their device into part of their botnet. The other is pressure from shareholders/management etc to ensure the code stays secret because imagine if a competitor had access to your IoT juicer's firmware and used it in their own product, oh no!

bitwize|2 years ago

The future of computing is that all code running on a device is one of the two S's: Signed or Sandboxed.

To do otherwise presents unnecessary risk.