>that ARM could do just about anything to the poor 486 without it ever being the wiser.
Any device with DMA has that same issue, though. You could plug in a hard drive that takes control of the CPU by writing new instructions when certain conditions are met. Even if it doesn't have DMA, it could fulfill a request with crafted data. You can't defend against an adversary in your own machine.
> You can't defend against an adversary in your own machine.
Not if you import large chunks of unknown hardware. But if you built the whole thing from scratch you could. And FPGA's with adversarial blocks in them (or a toolchain that would corrupt your own bitstream) are probably possible but I don't see these as realistic attacks against a one-off.
An i486 certainly doesn't have an integrated iommu, and none of the chipsets for 486s had them either (afaik), but that doesn't mean you can't add one if you're building up your system from scratch.
Or you could forego DMA completely if you wanted. Almost all DMA capable devices have some kind of non-DMA route to access the data. It may be slower and it would of course still enable an adversary with access to your hardware to replace the device you boot from with one that has compromised data on it. But at that level it is usually game over anyway. I was thinking of just using an SD card, and if you're really paranoid about this (which I am!) you could glue it into the slot or make it physically impossible to replace it without damage to the case.
Any device with DMA has that same issue, though. You could plug in a hard drive that takes control of the CPU by writing new instructions when certain conditions are met. Even if it doesn't have DMA, it could fulfill a request with crafted data. You can't defend against an adversary in your own machine.