Ultra Minimal Rust App for FPGA Precursor Mobile Device

[ediliziosantrapa]

I have read the longevity statement and only mention this collaboration because the project described below adheres even more strongly to the simplicity philosophy than SN does.

Preamble:
We are in the very early days of open hardware design and provably secure devices (unless you count fully airgapped machines, then we've had those for a while), but we are starting to see some good steps in the direction, such as the PinePhone and the Librem 5. It is possible today, as far as I know, to run Standard Notes on both of these devices fairly easily and that's great. Unfortunately even these best efforts fall short of full transparency, and mainstream devices could be recording every keystroke, totally invalidating the awesome encryption we come to expect from apps like SN and Signal.

However, the future of secure mobile devices is increasingly understood to be extremely simple, minimal hardware and codebase, and some of the best thinkers in the space have pointed to the next step in this process using FPGAs (see Paul Gardner-Stephen at Linux.Conf.AU, and now, the Precursor device from Bunnie. This device looks like the best answer to private mobile computing, and because it has an entire chip dedicated to running encryption algorithms, and has a qwerty keyboard, Standard Notes would be a perfect candidate for an early usecase of the device.

I also understand, applaud, and appreciate the philosophy of SN, and hate to even make a feature request, except that the philosophy of this "Precursor" mobile device takes the choices of SN, and pushes them even further, and is maximally simplistic to the point of essentially using the hardware of a 15 year old PDA to ensure safety. It is like a match made in heaven, and would be a dream come true to be able to take secure notes on an secure device to this extent. These is also a huge amount of future potential in this device and every single contribution to the future of open hardware will go a long way to making the world the secure place I know we all hope for. This will be the very first, as far as I know, device of this kind, which encrypts information (such as notes, messages, and voice) end to end, before it even hits a networked piece of hardware.

Describe the solution you'd like
The Precursor device will be running a super simple OS written in rust, which will run on the 16mb of SRAM and the 100mhz processor. This may seem small, but the idea is that the constraints are such that it will force code to be easily auditable by a single person or a small team. Ideally, there could be an extremely minimal Rust version of Simple Notes that could run on this barebones device, use the hardware encryption, and then sync like other versions. It would be like a Palm or early 2000s version of Standard Notes, but with modern encryption, a modern connectivity stack, and siginificantly better hardware overall, even though it would look dated by current standards.

Describe alternatives you've considered
There will inevitably be a note taking app written early on for the device, I just want it to be Standard Notes because I love the project and ethos, and think they line up. I also think it would be an amazing marketing opportunity for Standard Notes directly to a niche of developers and users that would appreciate SN, and a larger user base means more money for SN and that makes me happy since I really want SN to be around forever. It is a match made in heaven. Super minimal security buffs!

Additional context
I will buy (or donate money towards, if others are interested) a development unit of the Precursor to put it in the hands of Standard Notes devs. I can only cross my fingers Rust is in your guys' wheelhouse.

[ediliziosantrapa]

Just discovered that there is already a rust implementation. Excited to pursue further
https://github.com/matze/iridium

[JaspalSuri]

Hi @ediliziosantrapa,

Thank you so much for providing a detailed feature request. This definitely interesting and I have recorded it in our internal forums. I'm sure that more members of the team could chime in with more information (and we think Rust is cool), but I think that this is something that we couldn't currently commit to until we had more development resources, but hopefully can someday in the future.

Just discovered that there is already a rust implementation. Excited to pursue further

Thank you so much for sharing that! I'm glad that you were able to find something that might help.