This is a sketch of a design for the secure channel that we want to have between the Cryptech HSM and the client libraries which talk to it. Work in progress, and not implemented yet because a few of the pieces are still missing.
Basic design …
Everything you need to build our software, firmware, and FPGA bitstreams from source yourself is publicly available, but the process is a bit complicated. Overall, there are two methods, one of which our developers use while writing this stuff, the other of which we use for the automated reproducible builds …
This page attempts to explain the upgrade procedure for testing out the new "ksng" development branch of the Cryptech Alpha firmware.
This particular upgrade is more complicated than we would have preferred, due to the interaction of two unrelated factors:
Attached to this page are high resolution pictures.
The current revision of the Alpha board is rev03.
rev01 was the board known as the 'dev-bridge'.
rev02 was functionally the same as the rev03, but in another form factor.
The Cryptech Project maintains APT and Homebrew repositories containing packaged software for the Cryptech Alpha board for Debian and Ubuntu Linux and for Mac OS X. The binary packages also include pre-compiled images for the Alpha Board's Artix-7 FPGA, Cortex M4 ARM CPU, and AVR ATtiny828 MCU.
apt-get install cryptech-alpha opendnssec opensc
Once you have the software package installed, you may need to upgrade your HSM's firmware.