“A journey of many failings” and a world first trustable personal communications device
Kelsie Nabben — July 2020
They say that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, as in to make a living off inventing things, you need to celebrate your failures.
Well, hardware guru ‘Bunnie’ Huang has many. These may just qualify the release of his next invention for resounding success. Bunnie’s failings have resulted in the creation of Betrusted; the world’s first portable ‘secure enclave’.
Bestrusted looks like an Android phone but is not. A secure enclave refers to how to minimise attack surfaces in technology, typically seen in securing private keys (for encryption), Secure Element hardware chips, and Trusted Platform Modules, to randomise, securely generate cryptographic keys, attest, bind and seal computing devices for platform integrity; where a device behaves as intended. Betrusted is a protected hardware device that offers a computer processing unit (CPU) that is completely verifiable but sealed by its owner for security.
Yet, don’t be fooled by thinking that the notion of a secure device is just for privacy wonks or others with secrets to hide. The concept of a modern day, secure pocket computer has deep origins in information technology.
This pursuit hails back to the underlying purpose of computing: to aid people with a memory index.
“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
— Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic, 1945.
Betrusted is not a privacy device. It is a successful notch in a long-line of failures on the path towards ‘thinking machines’.
To prepare this invention for production, Bunnie has considered the entire technology stack; from silicon, to device, operating system and user experience. Challenges included how to encrypt all communications to and from the enclave and building the software, hardware and silicon, which is completely open-source.
Every element of the device has been carefully considered, with each design decision documented and unsuccessful result shared.
These include explorations in randomness for ‘True Number Generation’ (see Bunnies’s findings on True Number Generation (TRNGs) and avalanche noise sound design).
Another detour was due to COVID-19 with the creation of Simmel, a whole new ground-up hardware project in an effort to enable contact tracing while preserving user privacy. Simmel, (meaning, “what is society?”), explored both Bluetooth (BLE) based proximity tracing as well as making a detoured foray into ultrasound (NUS) as a contact tracing signal measure. The conclusion on the Simmel device?
"It's not great for contact tracing, but if you ever need a fully open source, non-RF, privacy-protecting method for provisioning small amounts of data to IoT devices over short ranges, this is a good starting point." - Bunnie HuangBestrusted was designed using human-computer interaction methods (HCI), and approach that aims to make computers usable by people. The underlying values of the technology stack on hand are transparency and trust. This is an important effort in the trend towards human focused engineering.
These failings show just how much damn work goes into the creation of people-first, opensource digital infrastructure, despite the difficulty of funding, lack of resources and limited support networks.
Just as Vannever Bush’s ideas predicted and influenced the development of personal computers, the internet, the world wide web, and online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia, creators and inventions demand our engagement, feedback and constructive criticism, to design and build digital infrastructures that protect and serve the interests of society.
To find out more about the public release see Bestrusted.io, or GitHub to contribute code, tips or respond to a number of open research questions.
Thank you to Bunnie Huang for sharing your progress and allowing me to share this article.
