Anelok: rfkill concept for the next board version

Bas Wijnen wijnen at debian.org
Sat May 10 14:34:23 EDT 2014


On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 03:02:57PM -0300, Werner Almesberger wrote:
> I'm considering a number of possibilities for rfkill functionality in
> the next Anelok version.
> 
> 0) no rfkill functionality at all,

The only benefit of this over 1 seems to be that the UI can be simpler.  I
think having the option is more important for the target audience.

> 1) "soft" rfkill by just politely asking the RF chip to refrain from
>    going on the air. The user would select rfkill via the GUI. For this
>    to work, we need to be able to trust MCU and RF.

IMO this is good enough.  Unless you do 4 or 5, the MCU must be trusted.  At
that point, trusting the rest of the code in the device as well doesn't open
any extra attack vectors: if the attacker can flash new firmware, they're in;
if they can't, they're not.

With a switch, you get more security, but I don't think it's worth the extra
cost, especially in terms of pcb footprint.  That's just my opinion, of course;
this is a subjective point.

Thanks,
Bas



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