Viewing profile — kmowery

One of my favorite vim plugins is https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim , which can open a pane showing the actual tree of versions, including at what time the version changed. j and k …

The starting research that enabled this security work appeared last year at ISCA, but didn't fully discuss the security implications: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~safari/pubs/kim-isca1…

Yeah, it definitely needs to be kept secret. Since you specified that A and B can have a set-up phase before C is around, the initial setup is fairly straightforward. Depending on …

I'd agree. An HMAC allows A and B to send messages to each other, through C, without C being able to change or modify the message in flight. A and B just need to share the HMAC key…

That's still fairly straightforward; change the message A signs to "I trust Gamma. Nonce: whatever. Valid Until: DateTime". B should then 1) check the signature and 2) check the da…

This is covered in the Range-R FAQ: http://www.range-r.com/FAQ/index.htm The RF bands they're using apparently don't go through metal so well.

Sure! It's ripped + modified from a project I'm working on, so it's a little messy: http://pastebin.com/ijr3thE2

It does a cmp+setz, which isn't a branch (and I believe is constant-time). An x86 branch would be cmp+jne or something similar.

I've been writing a bunch of branch-free code recently, so I took a crack at it. In my world, data-dependent table lookups might as well be branches, so let's eliminate those as we…

I believe they were referencing that in English it is "referrer", but has been misspelled in HTTP forever as "referer".

It's a little less clear than that, unfortunately. Apple chose to not support third-party Bluetooth LE dongles, which might be a reasonable engineering limitation. However, if you …

No, they reproduced on "Intel (Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell) and AMD (Piledriver) systems using a 2GB DDR3 module." (see Section 4) They evict cache lines using the CLFLUS…

It's not that the key is generated in Javascript; it's more that the key is generated (and therefore known) by someone who is not you. Maybe you trust StartSSL with your private ke…

We don't have one of those machines to test on, so we can't say for sure. We think it's likely that they went through the same sort of evaluation process that put the Secure 1000 i…

Hi! Lead author here. We'll be giving a talk on this work tomorrow at the USENIX Security, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have here before then.

Yes we did! Any organic material shows up pretty well under backscatter X-ray, and so can be used to cover darker contraband. You can see this done with Teflon in our gallery: http…

That's correct. We think the millimeter wave machines should be looked at in a similar adversarial study, but we don't have access to one for testing.

You'd be surprised how difficult it was to bring it on campus and actually turn it on! Over the course of the project, we worked with our IRB, radiological safety experts, regulato…

The $1 billion number covers procurement, deployment and usage of both the Rapiscan Secure 1000 backscatter X-ray and L3 ProVision millimeter wave AIT systems. The Secure 1000s hav…

That's correct. We have our own machine and tested it in a lab setting; we never attempted to smuggle contraband in the field.

Hi! Lead author here. We'll be giving a talk on this work tomorrow at the USENIX Security conference, but I'd be happy to answer questions here before then!

Hi! Lead author here. We only had a person in front of the X-ray scanner a few times, to minimize exposure. Most of the time we scanned a radiological "phantom", which is designed …

As a complete derail: Floating point, as IEEE standard? Beautiful. Elegant. One of my favorite technical standards. Other than the +0/-0 thing, it's perfect. Floating point, as imp…

This sort of 0-day has been known in the academic literature for some time[1]. Disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in implantable devices is far more fraught than your normal cr…

Almost certainly repost prevention... I tried to add this article yesterday and was upvote 4 on the previous link. It just didn't get the random boost it needed to make it to the f…