Boot Security Mastery Conference 2026

In essentially every PC, the SPI flash chip package itself provides a relatively standardized interface to the SPI bus over which firmware is loaded and reprogrammed - if you've ever used a Pomona clip, this is exactly what they do. Flashkeeper is a system of add-on hardware, designed around the "chip adapter" - a flexible PCB designed to install permanently on top of the SPI flash chip itself. Simple variants provide functionality such as SPI bus breakout (useful in development whenever SPI flash is hard to access), or standard SPI flash write protection control (pictured). Another variant places an iCE40 FPGA on the chip adapter, allowing authenticated external flashing and vendor-agnostic runtime flash image verification (i.e. without requiring Boot Guard or similar). Unlike vendor-provided firmware verification tools, the Flashkeeper FPGA module is an open-hardware general-purpose computer under user control, and is designed, built and configured using an entirely open toolchain - this allows all functionality to be extended and customized by the user.