TKey: A reasonably secure RISC-V computer in a USB stick
TKey: A reasonably secure RISC-V computer in a USB stick
Note: I am not affiliated with the project
Just to note, Tillitis (the company behind this) was spawned by Mullvad: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-creates-a-hardware-company
The more you know! I don't follow their blog so I didn't realize this. This is a pleasant surprise and yet another reason to love Mullvad.
The only reason I am hesitant about mullvad is that they are swedish based
I am engorged.
Seems like a cool project, but with such weak specs what can one actually do with this?
The specs are literally the reason why people would buy this. It's basically the best device we have available that can be used as a base for devices handling secure computation, or software handling secure computation. Think of a FIDO2 key, or a gpg smartcard, all secure and verifiable
Ehhhh... I'd recommend a Teensy instead, or a variety of other microprocessors. At $72, this is awful value. And there seems to be no specifications with regards to power-consumption.
https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy41.html
Teensy 4.1 gives you Hardware Floating point, 100 MBit Ethernet, USB, 600MHz, 1024kB of SRAM, 7MB of Flash for like $35 and within ~100mA of current usage at this 600MHz speed, meaning it easily runs off of AA Batteries for over a day with just a bit of idle/sleep cycles.
This thing is like 5x more MHz with 8x more RAM than an Arduino. 18MHz and 128kB is plenty.
Remember: the Apollo flight computer (Moon landing) was accomplished with 2MHz and 4096 bytes of RAM. Even the Arduino is more computationally powerful than the Moon Lander.