Free Microcode
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We can have free microcode; we just have to go back to the Lisp Machine which Alfred Szmidt has brought back from the dead using tape archives from MIT & released System version 100. This is a significant milestone in the restoration effort & is amazing to see. The Lisp Machine even has free microcode, something that newer computers have lost. Plus: It's licensed under the AGPLv3-or-later. Let's go edit the microcode to make it do whatever we want.
I am a translator!
Unfortunately, I cannot find anymore the link that you posted on reverse engineering of Intel microcode. Can you provide it again? Thanks!
I believe you may be referring to this:
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9058-everything_you_want_to_know_about_x86_microcode_but_might_have_been_afraid_to_ask.
There was also a link to the paper, but I have not managed to locate it. Someone deleted their account, it seems, and the related posts went back to the void, except for mailing list users.
UPDATE: Here you go: "We demonstrated that malicious microcode updates can have security implications for software systems running on the hardware."
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.00948.pdf
Was Intel microcode successfully RE'd at some point? Long ago I did read about some investigation that was unfruitful because of the signature checks on microcode updates (and maybe encryption).
On older AMD processors, on the other hand, there was some success[1]. The GitHub repo has no license but that is probably a minor problem — it's the knowledge and not the code that's relevant here
Great: we now have the video presentation, the paper and the repo.
While we are at it, here are two interesting CPU reverse engineering stories:
https://www.righto.com/2023/03/8086-register-codes.html
https://www.righto.com/2016/02/reverse-engineering-arm1-processors.html
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