ITX Motherboard with an Elbrus CPU (opens in new tab)

AFAICT, this has much less documentation than the Itanium, so even from a tinker's perspective, this is really uninteresting.

That's why the author wasn't able to obtain one before: they simply never bothered releasing it for non-government use.

What better chip to use than one that the Russian government assumes is only going to be used by loyal compatriots anyway? Anyway, that sounds like something a Russian spy would say, so make of it what you will.

I'd contemplate buying it if it had less binary blobs in it than an Intel or an AMD does. But maybe we don't have to go to Russia for that, as it feels like PC compliant ARM builds are going to be a thing soon.

However, while it's often proposed as such, I don't think it's actually useful - thermal fault injection is a real threat, but I said "theoretical" since it's the least of your problems when the attacker has physical access - both clock and power fault injection are easier. Nevertheless, at least a countermeasure to thermal faults is reasonable if you are just protecting a smartcard where everything is on a single chip. On the other hand, for a computer motherboard, such a sensor looks pretty useless. The target is simply too large to be protected (unless you can seal the entire system in a box fitted with sensors like a hardware security module). But I guess it is still a theoretical security feature, thus it was listed as such despite its uselessness.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/190.pdf

> [...] We further presentheating faults by operating the devices beyond their specified temperature ratings. The efficiency of this kind of attack is shown by a practical attack on an RSA implementation. Finally, we introduce data remanence attacks on AVR microcontrollers that exploit the Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) property of internal SRAM cells. We show howto recover parts of the internal memory and present first results on an ATmega162. The work encourages the awareness of temperature-based attacks that are known for years now but not well described in literature. It also serves as a starting point for further research investigations.

I don't think I've seen anyone do that in practice though, it might just have been that they had to put _something_ extra in the security features and just added whatever sensor wasn't listed yet.

Not said anywhere but the spec looks like this is a good fit for military or industrial control panels.

Edit, there’s more info on other sites, it does look like the compiler cache? https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15823/VVolkonsky-RSCDays-2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk

No, it's clearly a Russian national security project around supply chain security. IIRC, while the US is pretty good on the processor front, they have similar concerns around other ICs and components.

There is not a chance that they hope to make money on it.