Krystian Hebel

Firmware Engineer interested mostly in things deliberately omitted from documentation. Thinks C is high-level language, can write something in Verilog but doesn’t know how to read it yet.


Articles (23)


Research of RAM data remanence times

Published at December 13, 2024 ·  14 min read

Dynamic RAM must be periodically refreshed to maintain its content. JEDEC specifies how often this has to be done to ensure proper operation. In this post, we will see for how long the data can be recovered if it isn't....

Categories: miscellaneous

TrenchBoot Anti Evil Maid - Phase 4

Published at May 17, 2024 ·  7 min read

This blog post marks the completion of the next phase of TrenchBoot Anti Evil Maid project for Qubes OS. This time the project focused on AMD platforms, which is something that wasn't possible with the original solution based on tboot....

Categories: bootloader firmware hypervisor os-dev security

How TwPM is tested

Published at January 31, 2024 ·  7 min read

This post shows how we tested simple commands on TwPM, which is our attempt at making TPM more open....

Categories: firmware security

TrenchBoot Anti Evil Maid - Phase 3

Published at January 12, 2024 ·  8 min read

This blog post marks completion of next phase of TrenchBoot Anti Evil Maid project for Qubes OS. Even though user experience didn't change too much, the implementation went through a major overhaul....

Categories: bootloader firmware hypervisor os-dev security

Fobnail Token - example use case

Published at May 19, 2023 ·  11 min read

This phase focused on using Fobnail in a real-life use case, namely using it to access LUKS2 decryption key if and only if the PCR measurements are valid...

Categories: security

Fobnail Token - Fobnail provisioning

Published at May 25, 2022 ·  9 min read

This phase is about provisioning Fobnail Token itself. The closing point of that process is creating a certificate for Token that can be used later after attestation succeeds...

Categories: security

Talos II - second CPU support and test automation

Published at April 15, 2022 ·  5 min read

Another post about our adventures with porting coreboot for Talos II. This phase focused on enabling second CPU and its internal devices. We also expanded our test suite....

Categories: firmware

Fobnail Token - platform attestation

Published at April 6, 2022 ·  6 min read

The Fobnail Token is an open-source hardware USB device that helps to determine the integrity of the system. The purpose of this blog post is to present the development progress of this project. This phase was focused on attestation....

Categories: firmware security

Fobnail Token - platform provisioning

Published at March 21, 2022 ·  7 min read

The Fobnail Token is an open-source hardware USB device that helps to determine the integrity of the system. The purpose of this blog post is to present the development progress of this project. This phase was focused on platform provisioning....

Categories: firmware security

Current status of coreboot and Heads ports for Talos II

Published at February 16, 2022 ·  8 min read

This post summarizes our current progress on making first coreboot port for POWER platform, including Heads as a payload. It will also show how You can test it without having to flash firmware to PNOR....

Categories: firmware