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Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

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Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#311

Post by non_sequitur »

OJFord wrote: post #151
chollida1 wrote: post #4

From another source to provide some colour: > According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and L…

> One of our suppliers ... sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s ... Ouch, this doesn't play well for the supplier either! Presumably if Uber wins, it'd have a solid case against the supplier. If it loses, or while Waymo v Uber is ongoing, might there be a case anyway?

They'll most likely have a case, but it's also unlikely that the supplier would be big enough to cover any damages in the high 9-10 figures, they'd just throw in the towel and go bankrupt.

Also an argument that "we stole stuff but you're the one who leaked it so you should be punished" won't play well with a jury.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#312

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #151
chollida1 wrote: post #4

From another source to provide some colour: > According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and L…

> One of our suppliers ... sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s ... Ouch, this doesn't play well for the supplier either! Presumably if Uber wins, it'd have a solid case against the supplier. If it loses, or while Waymo v Uber is ongoing, might there be a case anyway?

[deleted]

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#313

Post by w00tw00tw00t »

rasz_pl wrote: post #270
w00tw00tw00t wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a candidate you're trying to please and build trust, so naturally I wouldn't raise questions that would indicate my lack of trust

Recruiter A to recruiter B: Well, I hoped this one would be sharp enough, guess we need to search harder for people that wont be careless with our company sensitive stuff laying around simply because someone told them to leave laptop behind and take a walk ...

it wasn't a company laptop

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#314

Post by w00tw00tw00t »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #217
w00tw00tw00t wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof I'm paranoid. My greater point, however, is that they have done some really shady stuff, and stealing competitor's IP is part of their culture, so their behavior itself promotes and justifies paranoia on my part and on the part of anyone looking to work for or do business with Uber. Reputation is everything.

It's pretty stupid to get paranoid over this. As GP pointed out if you logged out then it's very unlikely that they will get access.

I think it's pretty stupid to consider any consumer device to be secure enough. I did hear on HN some time before that interview that some USB device can be used to bypass the lock screen, which was the basis for my worrying. Now, some are saying in this thread that it is possible (or at least was at the time) while others saying that it is not (and was not) -- Even an educated sample of tech folks cannot make up their mind, so there is (or at least was) room for justified concern... no?

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#315

Post by joezydeco »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #70
tajen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google build such forsenics? Do they have spyware monitoring all their company laptops?

This was the noteworthy part for me as well. They had to know that he: 1. modified the software on his laptop 2. logged into an area he should not have had access to (this is probably standard) 3. attached an external drive (possible, but standard?) 4. and they got all this info after he deleted the drive, which means they either went in and found remaining data on the drive or else they captured the info in real tim…

It could be a lot simpler than that.

Perhaps the size of the downloaded repository is larger than the physical size of the drive on the laptop?

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#316

Post by fullshark »

dantiberian wrote: post #272

A really critical thing that hasn't got much attention is that shortly before leaving Waymo, Levandowski had a meeting with senior Uber execs(!). The day after the meeting, he formed 280 Systems which became Otto. The implication in the filing is that Uber planned this with Levandowski, and he only created Otto as a plausible corporate vehicle for developing the LiDAR technology before Uber acquired them. Given what…

Paragraph 48 if anyone is wondering.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#317

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #277
bmon wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a whitelist of hardware fingerprints, similar to what Microsoft does with Windows installations. Also, Google is known to have custom manufactured hardware, specifically with security in mind. I don't think the idea that Google is able to secure their own network against foreign devices is really that far-fetched.

None of that would solve the issue. Google can only verify what hardware you're running by sending a packet via ethernet to your device. You control all software running on your device, and can send a spoofed result. If you were crazy, you could even just emulate Google's hardware entirely and proxy all requests to that emulated hardware. Nonetheless, while this guy certainly wouldn't be able to do it, many Google em…

[deleted]

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#318

Post by etler »

kuschku wrote: post #291
etler wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they do a chip and pin style hardware solution where a security chip generates a response using a unique secret algorithm?

That would work — until someone decaps a few of these chips. They're already doing something similar, after all.

Wouldn't you need to decap every individual chip you want to compromise?

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#319

Post by estro »

itchyouch wrote: post #204
mevile wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems criminal. I remember an engineer from goldman sachs went to prison for doing something similar.

Based on the story from Flash Boys, that Goldman engineer was taking something like a couple of megs worth of his own work that was related to various open source projects. But he became the poster boy for stealing trade secrets and an example to be made of. His mistake was that he used the company internet connection to upload said source files to something like his personal github or dropbox of the sort, so there w…

What's to stop someone from sending sensitive data as an attachment via email using an encrypted email service? I don't think a proxy can detect much besides data size correct? I suppose a virtual desktop could log which files are uploaded.

Re: Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

#320

Post by MertsA »

kuschku wrote: post #291
etler wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they do a chip and pin style hardware solution where a security chip generates a response using a unique secret algorithm?

That would work — until someone decaps a few of these chips. They're already doing something similar, after all.

But that's really not the case here. Making secure computing elements like TPMs or HSMs, or Apple's Secure Enclave or the plethora of other devices out there is a solved problem. You can decap it and try to get that data out of it but at the very least with the current state of the art you can make this very unlikely to succeed and extremely expensive to even attempt.

Handwaving away all of this as just a minor nuisance is silly. An attacker would have to find some unknown side channel or try to physically modify the TPM to get at the data, either approach means the attacker has significant resources, certainly well beyond the means of our hypothetical attacker. Heck, it's been speculated that even the NSA couldn't get data out of something like Apple's Secure Enclave without risking destroying it in an attempt.

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