Industry Expert Blogs

The latest RISC-V workshop was held at Google. In the middle of the day, there was an interesting presentation by Eric Grosse. He used to be VP of security at Google but he has recently returned to more hands-on engineering work. His talk was titled Trust, Transparency, and Simplicity.

Eric got an awakening in December 2009 when it became clear that Google had been hacked by the Chinese military. This became known as Operation Aurora (Google was not the only company targeted, others like Juniper Networks and Morgan Stanley were, too). Eric's first tenet is that you need to know your adversary. Some nation states are extremely competent, he said, but even the less competent can still cause trouble. His list was China, Russia, the "5 Eyes"—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and the "friendly" states like Korea and France. Even Syrian rebels, who are not that good but "good enough."