[ltp] Can you trust your firmware?

[Connor Behan]

>
>
> If your goal is that you **must** have a system where there is no propiretary firmware
> at all, you'll need to go back to MIT's 6.004 class from about a
> decade ago, when students were taught how to build a computer using
> nothing more than prototyping breadboard, 74XX TTL integrated
> circuits, and wire.  (The class did provide modules for the RS-232
> interface, memory, and a simple ALU, so it wasn't *all* 74XX logic
> chips, but it was close, and there definitely wouldn't have been any
> microcode except in the 8250 serial UART.)
>   
Heh, that sounds awesome. Would knowing every last detail of a processor help make decompiling as easy as compiling? I like to think of compiling as differentiation and decompiling as integration. If you were to make your own processor from scratch, do you think it would be possible to design it in such a way that any code compiled to run on it would be completely reversible? I mean you take one look at a binary file in a hex editor and a vision of what the source code would be follows immediately from that?