Is your laptop secure? In the age of widespread snooping from the NSA and so many others, do you really know that your machine is safe? Is every part of it steeled against attack from miscreants across the web? Those may seem like questions born from paranoia. But recent revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shown us that, in many ways, we're right to be paranoid.
Many are working to ensure that the software on your laptop is secure. Just this week, Mozilla called for engineers across the globe to audit its open source Firefox web browser, hoping to prove that it hasn't been compromised by the NSA or anyone else. And you can easily put your faith in an operating system like Linux. It too is open source, with countless eyes constantly looking over its code.
But what about the hardware inside your laptop? What's going with all those tiny circuits on the motherboard? Or in the firmware that controls the motherboard and other low-level parts? All that is closed source. The rest of the world can't help you there.
That's why Sean "xobs" Cross and Bunnie Huang embarked on what they call Project Novena, building a homemade laptop with open source hardware – hardware whose specs are freely available to everyone. Or at least, that's partly why they built it. They also wanted to have some fun. As Huang puts it, they wanted to "learn new things while making something we would actually use on a daily basis."
And they want others to use it too. According to Huang, the pair are planning a crowdfunding campaign to finance a more friendly version of their open source laptop. In the meantime, you can find the specs and case designs on the project's wiki and use them to build your own.
Cross and Huang are the founders of Sutajio Ko-Usagi, a hardware company based in Singapore. The two met while working at Chumby, an internet appliance outfit co-founded by Huang, and in the years since, they've worked on countless boutique hardware projects, ranging from the Safecast open source Geiger counter to the Kovan robot controller. Most recently, at the Chaos Computer Congress event in Germany, the duo demonstrated a host of security vulnerabilities they've found in various SD cards – and they gave this presentation on the Novena.
"The motherboard, battery board, and display adapter board are designs from whole cloth," Huang says of the machine. "Every trace on those PCBs was placed by my hand." They also designed the case, which includes several components that you can print from a 3-D printer. And instead of proprietary firmware, they used the open source Das U-Boot.
It's not the fastest or the most portable of laptops. Equipped with 4GB of RAM and an ARM processor you're more likely to find in a cell phone, it offers the power of the average netbook, but it's the size and weight of a budget laptop from the middle aughts. "It's no feather," Huang says.
But what the Novena lacks in modernity it makes up for in transparency. "If you see something suspicious in the hardware, you have the opportunity to look it up in the reference schematics and see if it really is a cause for concern," Huang explains. In other words: you can check for NSA backdoors.
But not every piece of hardware inside the Novena is open source. The screen, keyboard, hard drive, power supply, and processor were all purchased off the shelf, and it's powered by a hacked RC car battery pack.
For now, the Novena is probably as close as it gets to a truly open source laptop, but there are other options. For those willing to live with a proprietary graphics driver, there are a few do-it-yourself laptop designs that use the open source Raspberry Pi board. And for those who want something that works out of the box, there's Gluglug's customized Thinkpad x60, which uses an open source firmware called Coreboot.
None of these machines can compete with the style and the power of a MacBook Air, but each offers something Apple probably never will: near complete control over just about everything. Not something you want? You're missing out on the fun.