Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms • Hacker News Board

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#221

Post by Kadin » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #214

nickpsecurity wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've addressed a good chunk of what it takes for system and hardware security in at least two places: http://pastebin.com/y3PufJ0V https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468624 There won't be 100% security because underlying physics fights you and our field is too new. Best we can hope for is making attacks hard and physical . There's great work in secure HW/SW architectures that should knock out about all SW stuff w…

Ok. Maybe that may work. But what about legal risks? extra-legal risks(like vanishing in the dead of night) ? soft risks - how would the wife of someone who is just the customer will respond when guys in black suits will come to her home ? Or if you're method will work so well, are you sure TSMC/Samsung will even accept you as a customer ? Because it doesn't seem like something that could scale without the legal/poli…

Many big players have vested interest in hardware platforms that are not tampered with out-of-the-box, or open to easy tampering, by their adversaries.

The Chinese have an interest in having a hardware platform that doesn't have NSA code baked into it; the US government and major US corporations likewise want hardware that doesn't phone home to Unit 61398. The Russians don't want either but probably have their own ambitions. Etc.

I think that in the next few decades it will become quite accepted that you choose your platform based on who your perceived "adversary" is. If you're concerned about the NSA, you buy a system that's Chinese from soup to nuts. If you're concerned about the PLA, you buy from a vendor with the US Government seal of approval.

It remains to be seen -- and in truth, I am somewhat pessimistic -- about the availability of a hardware/software ecosystem that doesn't require compromise. Hardware fabrication is a capital intensive industry, and capital intensive industries are pretty vulnerable to coercion by the governments in which all their capital equipment sits. ("That's a real nice chip fab you have there. It'd be a shame if something...happened...to it. Maybe you want to reconsider your offer to help us out?")

An open architecture that you could get from any number of vendors, and perhaps use to keep the vendors honest, would be a huge step in the right direction, though. But the underlying problem is extremely hard.

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#222

Post by 5ilv3r » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #197

vox_mollis wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except modern baseband processors usually don't have direct access to main memory or peripherals - they are usually linked to the rest of the phone via a serial bus. ME is very, very different - it transparently has access to everything.

> Except modern baseband processors usually don't have direct access to main memory or peripherals - they are usually linked to the rest of the phone via a serial bus. Do you know where I can read more about that? A good, technical, authoritative resource? In my little bit of research, details are sparse and authoritative technical details even more sparse.

Paranoid android used to have a nice breakdown on which phones had isolated memory for the baseband and which used shared memory. I cannot find it now, and their site seems to have taken a very wrong turn in the design department.

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#223

Post by Kadin » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:17 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #150

MichaelGG wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SGX has the potential to be amazing though. With it you can build "trusted" applications. For example, a Bitcoin mixer that's provably secure. (Well as secure as trusting Intel and users not to be able to break the chip.)

As it is right now you're giving up your liberty (debugging/inspecting/tinkering) in exchange for security. That's generally a bad trade. Sadly one that many people are willing to make until it bites them. It would be a lot better if secure mode had its own supervisor mode that worked through a master key that could be installed at boot time.

It's really a question of who you trust. There are lots of scenarios where you might trust the developer of a particular piece of software more than you trust the entire software stack running on your PC. This is especially true for a nontechnical / casual / grandma user, who has no hope of ever auditing or even having more than a vague idea of what's running on their computer at a given time, and probably is running (or at least needs to be assumed to be running) six different kinds of malware all the time. To someone like that, the PC itself is a hostile environment which they don't want to share certain information (e.g. their banking details, crypto keys, etc.) with. SGX allows you to ensure that.

If you take on premise that the PC is not safe and under your control, but is instead hostile and compromised, basically an outpost of the Internet in your house, then SGX and similar start to make sense. For many people, their computer is always going to be hostile; it was never "theirs" to begin with, so SGX doesn't really cost them anything, and the ability to let a single application basically force its way down to the hardware and elbow everything else in the stack out of the way is an improvement over having to trust the OS, browser, etc.

In a way it represents an abject failure on the part of the dominant OS developer (Microsoft) to produce a consumer computing platform that the average user can trust, as well as the failure of most other alternatives (e.g. DoD-style smartcards) to take off in the consumer market.

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#224

Post by Animats » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:22 PM UTC

ashitlerferad wrote: post #11

speeder wrote: post #5

I've been looking into this recently. Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly "binary blobs loaders", having more binary blob than free software code running. There is some good analysis on why even Intel can't fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel…

People have certainly done ME reverse engineering: http://me.bios.io/

They don't seem to have gotten very far, and the last update seems to be four years ago.

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#225

Post by Kadin » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:24 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #219

nickpsecurity wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't. I'd use Gaisler's immediately because it's fully open and already FPGA qualified. I'd then buy a good FPGA board. Then I'd run it on there. It would probably run like a multi-core version of my old Pentium II. Yet, I programmed, hacked, gamed, and so on with it. Later, I'd put it on an eASIC Nextreme or actual ASIC if money came in for better performance, power, and unit pricing.

"I'd use Gaisler's immediately because it's fully open and already FPGA qualified. I'd then buy a good FPGA board. Then I'd run it on there. It would probably run like a multi-core version of my old Pentium II." Sorry, let me clarify ... Pretend you have three kids. But at the same time you'd like to tinker with a fully open system from loader on up. Is there an old sun sparc that would make rms happy that I could bu…

I think the last generation of SPARC-based workstations in wide production were the Ultra 45s. They were made until 2008, according to Wikipedia [1]. They sell for surprisingly high prices [2], for an almost-decade-old computer, on eBay.

You could probably get an old Apple PowerPC-based system for considerably less than that, and a LibreBoot-compatible x86 system for even less, but they do exist if you wanted to play around with the architecture.

And they do look pretty cool as well.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ultra_series

[2]: See eBay item 121411279863, which is a Ultra 45 1x 1.6 GHz SPARC with 2GB RAM and 250GB HDD for almost $2k, asking price. Not sure if that's a realistic ask, but it's what they want for it.

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#226

Post by ElijahLynn » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:29 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #116

qubex wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The KGB no longer exists. It was superseded by the FSB in 1995.

Clever of them to make the world think they don't exist anymore! Only surpassed by the Czech navy... but I better not speak of such topics.

If a brand develops a bad name, they just get a new name.

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#227

Post by HappyTypist » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

muricula wrote: post #34

DenisM wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will be sitting pretty with their own CPU, heh? At least in the iOS devices, but who knowns what the (near) future brings to the Mac line.

I doubt it. The powerpc to Intel switch was really painful because the desktop platform has the perpetual ball and chain of backward compatability. I doubt Apple would try to beat Intel at their own high performance game anyway.

Apple has started requiring Mac App Store apps to be submitted in the immediate representation form, allowing Apple to recompile. If that's not a glaring hint at working towards ARM, what would be?

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#228

Post by Animats » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:33 PM UTC

The way to blow this wide open is to catch Intel's "management engine" doing something really bad and publicize it. It could do for Intel what John German did for Volkswagen AG.[1]

One approach would be to build some honeypots likely to attract attention. Give them a job that's not too traffic intensive but is suspicious, such as encrypted IRC. Record all traffic in and out of the box using external hardware. Get them fake encrypted traffic from suspicious sources (Tor, strange sites in suspicious countries, etc.) Wait for strange packets to show up that are not meaningful to the host software but cause something to happen on the target.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34519184

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#229

Post by HappyTypist » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:40 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #120

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe you are correct. They have been mentioning that their ARM processors are desktop worthy. I also believe Apple are displeased with Intel's current inability to consistently get their new chips to market. All of this has to make one think Apple will take matters into their own hands soon. Likely within the next 2 years.

It sounds almost unbelievable, but it could happen. I mean, Apple, unlike every other computer company, has successfully transitioned processor architecture twice before (68k to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel). They could pull the same tricks they pulled for PPC to have a smooth transition: x86 emulation on ARM, “Universal” (fat) binaries, and making it easy for developers to port their apps.

They don't need universal with the App Store. App Store submissions must be in bitcode, allowing Apple to recompile on their end

Re: Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

#230

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 11:48 PM UTC

Kadin wrote: post #221

petra wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Maybe that may work. But what about legal risks? extra-legal risks(like vanishing in the dead of night) ? soft risks - how would the wife of someone who is just the customer will respond when guys in black suits will come to her home ? Or if you're method will work so well, are you sure TSMC/Samsung will even accept you as a customer ? Because it doesn't seem like something that could scale without the legal/poli…

Many big players have vested interest in hardware platforms that are not tampered with out-of-the-box, or open to easy tampering, by their adversaries. The Chinese have an interest in having a hardware platform that doesn't have NSA code baked into it; the US government and major US corporations likewise want hardware that doesn't phone home to Unit 61398. The Russians don't want either but probably have their own am…

> Hardware fabrication is a capital intensive industry, and capital intensive industries are pretty vulnerable to coercion by the governments in which all their capital equipment sits.

If the spec is open then it should be possible for a fancy lab to verify that the hardware is manufactured to spec, right? So if you have it manufactured in Taiwan but then have random samples verified by labs in the US, Japan and Europe, defectors could be detected. Then the manufacturer would have to risk destroying their business by getting caught inserting a backdoor.