Since the monitor is external, I wonder if they've considered monitors as attack surface: https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/MonitorDarkly
Correction. The temperature monitor is INSIDE the secure shell.
ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
111–120 of 195 posts
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
ORWL will go in stand-by if the user is further than 10meters away from the device, if moved when away, it will shut down. If the hardware is tampered with, or chilled, the SSD encryption key is deleted within milliseconds. iPhone or any other consumer product at this point have less or no physical protection. The physical level of protection is taken from the payment industry standard and applied to the consumer dev…
If you guys succeed, you should think about making phones.
We are actually talking about this. Thanks for your interest.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#113Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#114This appears to be a good solution to the wrong problem. Maybe if they team with someone working on secure computer software...
Kudos to the open source design but they should not encourage users to run windows on it.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key isn't in your head: you know the passphrase used to decrypt the key which is then kept in system memory. Techniques like the cold boot attack[0] or row hammer[1] can be used to retrieve the key and access your data. In the case of non-hardware-TPM secured encryption schemes the kernel or bootloader which must remain unencrypted for the system to boot can be backdoored to record the passphrase and/or the key.…
There is a section at the end of the page outlining mitigation techniques against these sorts of attacks. I'm not knowledgable enough to determine if these are sufficient measures but I just wanted to point it out since it sounds like you didn't see that. They specifically cover cold boot attacks for example.
Right, OP was asking why having physical access to a "normal" machine means pwnage: cold boot is one of those ways. The ORWL page describes how they mitigate that.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK IBM's spent a good amount of engineering effort on making linux stuff run on power.
Yes, in practice the only things that really need "porting" to POWER are low-level compilers, languages, runtimes, tooling, etc. that may have arch-specific code. Sometimes IBM does this (e.g. Google v8 + Node.js), sometimes not... yet? (e.g. rust).
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Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key isn't in your head: you know the passphrase used to decrypt the key which is then kept in system memory. Techniques like the cold boot attack[0] or row hammer[1] can be used to retrieve the key and access your data. In the case of non-hardware-TPM secured encryption schemes the kernel or bootloader which must remain unencrypted for the system to boot can be backdoored to record the passphrase and/or the key.…
There is a section at the end of the page outlining mitigation techniques against these sorts of attacks. I'm not knowledgable enough to determine if these are sufficient measures but I just wanted to point it out since it sounds like you didn't see that. They specifically cover cold boot attacks for example.
Yes, correct. We think we cover the cold boot vector. Here is a section from the product description.
Security mesh physically protects DRAM from both freezing specific components and removal. Breaching the mesh will trigger reactive root key delete and system power down.
Secure Microcontroller protects against chilling the full device - temps below -37℃ will trigger a tamper event, deleting root key and removing power from system.
Link to the complete Product Description: https://www.orwl.org/wiki/index.php?title=File:ORWL_PRD_v0.6...
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#118> If someone has physical access to your computer with secure documents present, it’s game over! Err, why? Is AES encryption not sufficient? And the key is secure in my head - not something someone could steal. So, why is this even a thing?
if someone has physical access to your computer with secure documents present, and then you use it again , it's game over.
Yes, physical access in most cases is a point of no GOOD return. That is why we emphasize so much on preventing this access. We have detailed the measures we have taken to prevent this here: https://www.orwl.org/wiki/index.php?title=File:ORWL_PRD_v0.6... Look at section: "ORWL Primary Key of Security or Root of Trust"
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's all fine and good but they should not advertise it as secure if it's not.
There's no such thing as "secure", and frankly complaining that anything that has better security than regular products shouldn't advertise as such is ridiculous. How else is there any progress when the community's just pulling everyone down with this "it's no good if it isn't completely perfect" crap?
Frankly I'm not sure it is any better than regular products. It still has a backdoor baked in.
Keep on downvoting because you disagree, though.
Re: ORWL – The first open source, physically secure computer
#120I 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?
If you're going to go through the process of taping out your own chips, RISC-V is probably your best bet at the moment.