Hardware Podcasts

Dead Printers Tell No Tales

Oxide and Friends · 24 Oct 2026 · 1h 18m · Episode 24

What this episode covers

Philip Tricca, a security engineer at Oxide Computer Company, explains the critical process of establishing a Root of Trust (RoT) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for their hardware products. He details the 'key ceremony' required to generate and store secrets securely, highlighting the initial use of a dot matrix printer for printing key shares and the subsequent discovery that tamper-evident packaging was being used incorrectly. The team had to repeat the ceremony to ensure the integrity of the key distribution, which is stored in a bank vault, to prevent spoofing and ensure customer trust before shipping their first rack-scale computers.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company, IANA, AMD
Also
Philip Tricca, Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Caliptra

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