[HN Gopher] OpenTitan Shipping in Production
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OpenTitan Shipping in Production
Author : rayhaanj
Score : 60 points
Date : 2026-03-05 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (opensource.googleblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (opensource.googleblog.com)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Clicking through links eventually led to
| https://lowrisc.org/ibex/ -
|
| > Ibex(r) is a small and highly configurable open-source RISC-V
| embedded processor available under an Apache 2.0 licence. It is
| formally verified and very well validated, and it has excellent
| toolchain integration, which has led many companies to use it in
| their commercial SoCs.
|
| > [...]
|
| > Ibex is the main CPU in the OpenTitan(r) root of trust, which
| has brought the quality of the design and documentation to new
| heights.
|
| So that's neat.
| gchadwick wrote:
| I worked on OpenTitan for around 5 years at lowRISC. It certainly
| has its ups and downs but it's generated some great stuff and I'm
| very glad to see hit proper volume production like this. Whilst
| there's definitely open source chips out there and lots more
| using bits of open source that don't actually advertise this fact
| I believe this is the first chip with completely open RTL that's
| in a major production volume use case.
|
| One of highlights working on OpenTitan was the amount of interest
| we got from the academic community. Work they did could actually
| get factored into the first generation silicon making it
| stronger. Ordinarily chips like that are kept deeply under wraps
| and the first time the wider security community can take a look
| at them development has long completed so anything they might
| find could only effect generation 2 or 3 of the device.
|
| Academic collaboration also helped get ahead in post quantum
| crypto. This first generation chip has limited capabilities there
| but thanks to multiple academics using the design as a base for
| their own PQC work there was lots to draw on for future designs.
|
| I'm no longer at lowRISC so I don't know where OpenTitan is going
| next but I look forward to finding out.
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is really great. OpenTitan has some useful IP components
| that can definitely be reused, and it's really cool that this is
| open. Nice one Google. I have to minority nitpick though:
|
| > both individual IP blocks and the top-level Earl Grey design
| have functional and code coverage above 90%--to the highest
| industry standards--with 40k+ tests running nightly
|
| This is definitely not "to the highest industry standards". I've
| worked on projects where we got to 100% on both for most of the
| design. It's definitely a decent commercial standard though - way
| above most open source verification quality.
| ggm wrote:
| I'm not seeking to criticise this product, I think this is a
| great development.
|
| But, for almost all people this is shifting from one kind of
| "trust me bro" to .. another. We're not going to be able to
| formally prove the chip conforms to some (verilog?) model, has no
| backdoors, side channels, you-name-it. We're in the same place we
| were, with the same questions. Why do we trust this and the
| downstream developments? Because we do.
|
| I know people who worked on cryptech, and I definitely had trust
| in their work, personal commitment to what they did, but that's
| "who you know" trust. The non transitive quality of this kind of
| trust is huge.
|
| To be more critical my primary concern will be how deployment of
| this hardware is joined by significantly less benign design
| choices like locked bootloaders, removal of sideloads. To be very
| clear that's a quite distinct design choice, but I would expect
| to see it come along for the ride.
|
| To be less critical, will this also now mean we get good
| persisting on device credentials and so can do things like X.509
| certs for MAC addresses and have device assurance on the wire?
| Knowing you are talking to the chipset which signed the
| certificate request you asserted to before shipping is useful.
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(page generated 2026-03-05 23:00 UTC)