I wonder how realistic it is to get the simplest ARM design and make "your own" chip? I mean there should be blueprints somewhere, if you could ask someone to make a small batch of these chips? It would be too small to be worth it for someone to inject a backdoor into it. Or you could make that into an FPGA... Am I talking nonsense?
ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
31–40 of 195 posts
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#32ORWL was designed specifically to prevent undetected tampering with any of its electrical components, including the entire motherboard and storage drive. When tampering is detected, ORWL immediately and irrevocably erases all your data, even if it is unplugged at the time.
and...
Upon any tampering, the secure microcontroller instantly erases the encryption key, causing all data on the SSD to be irrevocably lost.
If only the key is deleted, wouldn't that leave the drive susceptible to brute force?
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#33ORWL was designed specifically to prevent undetected tampering with any of its electrical components, including the entire motherboard and storage drive. When tampering is detected, ORWL immediately and irrevocably erases all your data, even if it is unplugged at the time. and... Upon any tampering, the secure microcontroller instantly erases the encryption key, causing all data on the SSD to be irrevocably lost. If…
Uhh.. yes but enjoy brute forcing a 256 bit key.
See you in a few trillion years.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#34ORWL was designed specifically to prevent undetected tampering with any of its electrical components, including the entire motherboard and storage drive. When tampering is detected, ORWL immediately and irrevocably erases all your data, even if it is unplugged at the time. and... Upon any tampering, the secure microcontroller instantly erases the encryption key, causing all data on the SSD to be irrevocably lost. If…
I assume the encryption is strong so brute force would be useless.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#35ORWL was designed specifically to prevent undetected tampering with any of its electrical components, including the entire motherboard and storage drive. When tampering is detected, ORWL immediately and irrevocably erases all your data, even if it is unplugged at the time. and... Upon any tampering, the secure microcontroller instantly erases the encryption key, causing all data on the SSD to be irrevocably lost. If…
Uhh.. yes but enjoy brute forcing a 256 bit key. See you in a few trillion years.
Quite a lot more than a few trillion.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#36This doesn't seem all that secure. Against an Evil Maid attack, your best mitigation is to be able to keep everything, OS and all, on a portable drive which is self-encrypting; essentially an encrypted PE.
Why not? Seems secure against evil maid to me (barring hardware backdoors like Intel).
They explicitly address several attacks here:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/design-shift/orwl#specific-attac...
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#37Having some physical security in a OSS-hacker-compliant form factor is really quite nice. This is not going to replace a proper HSM, and almost certainly is a less secure place to store your data than an iPhone; but it's a good start for those unwilling to give up on (the performance of) PCs. It's worth noting that QubesOS, which is supported by this system, protects against e.g. USB-based attacks by running a virtua…
Why is it potentially less secure than an iPhone? Attackers can't scan the RAM because of the enclosure, whereas they might do so on an iPhone, correct?
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#38ORWL was designed specifically to prevent undetected tampering with any of its electrical components, including the entire motherboard and storage drive. When tampering is detected, ORWL immediately and irrevocably erases all your data, even if it is unplugged at the time. and... Upon any tampering, the secure microcontroller instantly erases the encryption key, causing all data on the SSD to be irrevocably lost. If…
There are reasonable issues that could be raised about various meta-data leaks with full-disk encryption. For example, in a completely naive per-file encryption scheme, the (approximate) file sizes would be visible. But I don't think "brute force" is a concern for reasonably modern encryption schemes. Of course, if they are using weak/short pins with a key derivation function, then that is vulnerable to brute force.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the crypto side of things is remove-able and carry-able on your person? Or what if it could be subdermally implanted so you know no one can pick pocket you and replace it? Just a thought.
> What if the crypto side of things is remove-able and carry-able on your person? You might as well have the entire computer removable and portable.
And that's pretty much what ORWL is.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#40Isn't the phrase Evil Maid a bit off-key? I'm sure this must have been discussed at great length elsewhere.
We could express the same idea without the power and gender relations implied.