[Libre-soc-dev] daily kan-ban update 13oct2022

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 02:03 lkcl <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 9:53 AM Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > because afaict you said it in a different way that didn't prohibit the
> word security.
>
> i explained to you *very clearly* that we cannot put any kind of security
> objectives onto the MoU.
>
> yet you insisted on adding - without my authorisation and without
> explicitly notifying me that you were doing so - wording which
> explicitly said that we INTENDED to make MODIFICATIONS
> to the HDL for the EXPLICIT purposes of "improving security".
>

no, it said that we intended to make modifications to the hdl to implement
instructions as well as potentially modifying existing code for any of a
number of entirely *optional* reasons, one of which is security. this means
security can be completely excluded from the list of reasons if we choose.

Here's what I wrote:
> Creation of the HDL code for the instructions used to implement the
Cryptographic
Primitives. This may include modification of the implementation of already
existing instructions if needed, in order to improve performance, security,
or other desired qualities.

I'm sorry, having security be a potential direct reason for changing
existing instructions' HDL was entirely unintended and i didn't realize I
wrote it that way till now, i intended that to be more like:
1. we decide to implement improvements for AES rather than DES partially
because DES is insecure. security is only a factor for deciding what
algorithms we care about.
2. some existing instruction is slow for how we need it for AES (e.g. mv.x
for S-BOXes at the time)
3. therefore we improve mv.x's speed

Jacob