Today I submitted the following comment on the FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Equipment Authorization and Electronic Labeling for Wireless Devices.

Thank you for inviting comments on the proposed rules for Equipment Authorization and Electronic Labeling for Wireless Devices.

I am the owner of Great Scott Gadgets, a US company that makes open source test equipment primarily for the information security industry. As a designer and manufacturer of communications equipment, I commend the Commission for seeking to clarify and streamline the rules for equipment authorization. I believe that, on the whole, the updated rules will benefit the electronics industry. However, I am concerned that the rules regarding software control of radio parameters place an undue burden on device manufacturers and unnecessarily restrict the actions of end users.

My concerns arise from rules already in place for Software Defined Radio (SDR) devices. I am encouraged to see that the Commission is eliminating certain special rules for SDR equipment and seeks to treat SDR and non-SDR devices in the same way. However, while the Commission notes that "the existing SDR rules have proven to be insufficiently flexible," the proposed rules broaden the reach of those rules to non-SDR equipment.

The requirement to implement security measures preventing the modification of software has long been unpopular in the SDR community. Software security is difficult, expensive, and unreliable, and it undermines reconfigurability, a principal benefit of SDR. The proposed rules extend this absurd requirement to all radio equipment with any software control, encompassing most radio devices manufactured today.

Under the proposed rules, all radio device manufacturers would be required to devise software security mechanisms that do not exist today, and they would have to prepare for each new device software documentation that is currently not required. Makers of integrated circuits would have to develop entirely new product lines that provide device manufacturers with security mechanisms, killing off existing product lines that lack such controls.

These requirements seem particularly onerous when considering the fact that computer security is largely an unsolved problem. Where manufacturers have had limited success preventing modification of software in electronic devices (e.g. in mobile phones), it has been accomplished only through great effort and expense. The engineering effort required to devise effective security measures (not to mention the cost and power consumption of cryptographic controls) may exceed the effort required to design many digital radio devices made today. A likely outcome is that software security mechanisms implemented in compliance with the proposed rules will prove ineffective and a waste of effort.

Great Scott Gadgets designs and manufactures Open Source Hardware (OSHW). The OSHW community includes a small but rapidly growing segment of the electronics industry that is committed to the ideals that end users have a right to fully control their own equipment and that anyone should be able to study, make, use, modify, and sell devices based on our published designs. OSHW makers recognize that, just as Open Source Software has resulted in great advances in the software industry, Open Source Hardware will enable future generations of hardware innovation.

As an OSHW designer, I have often been troubled by the Commission's rules for SDR. Great Scott Gadgets manufactures and sells HackRF One, an open source SDR platform popular for research and education. HackRF One is sold as test equipment, making it exempt from equipment authorization. As Open Source Hardware, however, it is a design that may be modified and sold by anyone. If someone were to use HackRF One as the basis for more specialized open source radio equipment that is not subject to the test equipment exemption, this new equipment would require authorization and would be subject to software security requirements that are incompatible with the open source license. We cannot grant open source licenses to users while locking out those same users.

This fundamental incompatibility with open source licensing greatly concerns me. The software security requirements, now that they will apply to non-SDR devices under the proposed rules, will adversely impact not just designers and users of Open Source Hardware but anyone making or using Open Source Software with any radio equipment. Today innovation is stifled by rules that make it difficult or impossible to sell OSHW SDR devices that are anything other than test equipment. Under the proposed rules, even more innovation will be curtailed.

I urge you to eliminate the software security requirements for both SDR and non-SDR equipment.

Additionally I am concerned about the proposal to grant automatic long-term confidentiality to certain types of exhibits. The Commission's Equipment Authorization database is a great public resource that is better protected by the existing rule that grants long-term confidentiality only upon request.