Why Talos™ II?

An In-Depth Interview with Timothy Pearson, Director of Research and Development at Raptor Engineering

Here at Raptor Engineering, we don't think that final control of the world's computing resources should reside in the hands of two major vendors, or even several vendors; understanding the extreme danger of this situation has catalyzed our development efforts toward creating truly secure, individually owned computing platforms, such as the Talos™ II.

Furthermore, the POWER9 architecture allows an owner-controlled signing key to be written to the processor module itself. Unlike other platforms, this means the entire boot firmware is controlled by a signing key unknown to external parties, such as the processor vendor or system manufacturer. With application of basic key-control methods and disk encryption—as should be standard in the IT world today—no one is capable, by design, of remotely accessing data on a Talos™ II system, except where such access has been explicitly granted by the machine owner.

This decentralized security model, upon which Talos™ II™ is built, stands in stark contrast to the pseudo-leased, centralized security model of other platforms; it is inherently stronger since exfiltrating, or breaking, one or two keys (the centralized model) is far easier than trying to exfiltrate thousands of keys across thousands of organizations (the decentralized model).

As I mentioned earlier, x86 has become too large of a security risk for us to ignore. The upcoming POWER9 CPUs have other compelling advantages, even outside of security, including CAPI technology for accelerators, massive caches, and very high I/O bandwidth. These traits are a perfect match for the computationally expensive engineering tasks we execute every day, and they also find a home in the cloud data center, where these same features allow more VMs (virtual machines) to be stuffed into a single machine than otherwise would be possible.

Due to cryptographic signing on all modern x86 platforms, vast areas of firmware are completely off-limits for open source—even if an individual or organization could otherwise write a replacement for that firmware. Talos™ II has none of these issues because your signing key, not the vendor's key, grants low-level access to the hardware.

Sadly, far too many have acquiesced to a userspace-only model for cost reasons; however, what these individuals don't see is the long-term, real cost of this approach. From environmental damage due to prematurely obsolete hardware (i.e., hardware that contains unpatchable firmware bugs that render it useless), to loss of knowledge of how computing systems function outside the application layer, to complete loss of privacy and self-actualization, the true costs of consumer-only computing are staggering.

By contrast, the Talos™ II system answers the call for "tools that can make more tools"—a libre-friendly computer capable of driving new research forward, and on which the next generation of powerful, even mobile, libre-computing products can be designed.

Additionally, for the first time in many years, major improvements to both RAM and PCIe bandwidth truly justify upgrading to a new platform. Currently, IBM's POWER9 is the only CPU available with these improvements, such as PCIe 4.0.

If you have an open-source application that just seems too slow on your current computer, Talos™ II can save you time and aggravation while protecting your valuable data.

Also, the availability of PCIe 4.0 and the ability to place a second CPU on the board meant that a costly PCIe switch was no longer needed. In addition, IBM has opened more of its technology, and brought other projects, such as OpenBMC, to a state where they can be shipped directly on new hardware. This is a major step forward for libre computing and has helped reduce the cost of the overall development effort required to bring Talos™ II to market.

The results speak for themselves: we are bringing to market a modern, POWER9 mainboard with all the features expected in a board of this class at a fraction of the cost.

Talos™ II uses a lower level of integration on its mainboard than most other offerings; this is a major part of how we can offer a truly libre-friendly machine, but at the same time it means that both production of the PCBs and electronic assembly is more complex than other systems. As a result, with Talos™ II, we would benefit less from the massive industry built around simpler PCBs overseas.

Due to its lack of black-box, vendor-controlled firmware, Talos™ II won't put you in a situation where you have to decide whether to shut down the part of the business processing PII; if a serious vulnerability is ever found, you don't need to wait for the vendor to issue updates or to buy new hardware. All you need to do is patch, recompile, and deploy your update. Reaction time to firmware-based security threats is minimized as a result of this open model, and multiple organizations can even work together to develop patches for their machines—without sharing protected data.