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China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture
MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
They still like to pretend they are communist to some extent. It's a national pride thing. Regardless, economic and political systems are not that closely linked: It's quite possible for a communist country to allow a great deal of political freedom, or a capitalist country to be as oppressive as any country can be.
There are only two differences between communism and capitalism:
1. which small group gets to make the decisions
2. which small group (same as in #1) is controlling the surveillance.
In communism, it's government/political leaders. In capitalism, it is the upper corporate echelon.
A backdoor standard would get them an expert medal in footshooting. Eventually some other country would find the backdoor and then be able to spy on all their businesses.
This is one of the arguments that killed the Clipper Chip -- if Skipjack ever was broken, or the LEAF fields tampered with (which both happened), it would mean a foreign power would have wholesale access to US secrets.
Another downside is simple -- heterogeneous environments make life easier for the blackhats. If everything used the same architecture, it means that a low level bug that can get code executed in ring 0 (to use Intel's terms) would affect everything from the embedded device, all the way to the supercomputers. Having different architectures means that damage due to a bug similar to the F0 0F bug of yore would be limited and containable.
While I have not the slightest doubt about the Chinese authorities' interests in surveillance, the ISA level seems a deeply strange layer to futz around with in order to further that goal. Are they planning on adding a MOVSCP(Move Word From String to Communist Party) instruction or something?
It seems that somebody looking to build bugs would be focusing on a mechanism a trifle higher-level: whatever 'TPM-but-don't-call-it-a-TPM-because-NIH-is-serious-business' standard they are plugging away at would be one logical place to look. Any 'National Operating System' type initiative would also be worth a look(though, realistically, retail spying on end user devices is kind of a pain in the ass, and vulnerable to discovery by hacker types, and you can just bug the telcos and ISPs instead, CALEA-or-nastier style, with much less fuss).
I'd be much more inclined to suspect some combination of quasi-mercantalist desire to avoid paying license fees to western tech outfits(and provide a convenient 'hook' by which foreign outfits who wish to score Chinese contracts can be forced to collaborate with whoever produces the blessed ISA) and a desire to (try) and prevent their government infrastructure being riddled with spots of code rotting on legacy architectures because some contractor who hasn't been in business in a decade had experience with it...