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“Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

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Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#151

Post by floatboth »

als0 wrote: post #149
floatboth wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fTPMs have been standard for a few years now. As I understand it, this Pluton thing is mostly about having a fully "hardware" TPM inside the SoC instead of a "firmware" one.

It's a mix. The keystore is apparently in hardware but there is Pluton firmware to manage it.

Yes, of course management firmware is everywhere. Having keys in special memory that is literally only connected to fixed-function crypto HW blocks is what makes something a "hardware" security thing.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#152

Post by gmueckl »

rektide wrote: post #54
darzu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only comment on the technical details I know of, not the business objectives of the parties involved. From a technical standpoint, Azure Sphere's OS was built on Linux. As far as I know, there isn't anything Windows specific to Pluton. Pluton was a separate (heavily-modified) ARM M4 core which we interfaced with from the main A7 core via a secure mailbox channel, which was again OS agnostic.

Frustrating that the announcement was made with so little technical details easily findable. This kind of decision- to use an ARM core- seem pretty questionable. That's how things always were done, but it feels like another UEFI/FAT32 situation, dragging in old encumbering legacy baggage with big IP implications, when there are available other options (RISC-V). It feels like this decision is being made literally one…

If this is intended to be a secure enclave, then it need to be pretty much a black box with a mininal interface to the outside world. Changing what is inside the box should be possible at any time then. On the other hand, why does it even matter that you know the CPU instruction set that's used inside the box when you can't ever have direct access to it?

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#153

Post by fefe23 »

The marketing for this chip is vague and confusing because the chip does absolutely nothing for you.

This chip is not here to protect you from compromised or malicious IoT devices, or to protect you from compromised or malicious cloud services.

This chip is here to protect the Microsoft cloud from compromised or malicious IoT devices. They would also like you to believe that the chip improves security in the cloud. In actuality it protects software running on your device from ... you. All this attestation stuff is great for DRM!

That poses a problem for marketing. They have to let it sound like it does something for you when it actually doesn't.

It's no surprise then that the marketing is basically a giant weasel word souffle with some buzzwords sprinkled on top, and a bit of name dropping.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#154

Post by gmueckl »

darzu wrote: post #34
Asmod4n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So.. this basically means swapping your CPU gets rid of anything you stored on its "TPM", or can it be backuped up to the TPM of your Mainboard and restored to the new one you install?

I think the whole idea here is that Pluton will be integrated inside of the same physical chip as the CPU. So physically swapping CPUs would swap your Pluton core too. But the Pluton I know of didn't really have any writeable storage. It had some special ROM and fuses that it uses internally for its private keys but that's basically it.

Did all units share the same set of keys? Isn't that an attack vector?

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#155

Post by qayxc »

anfilt wrote: post #96
qayxc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of these use cases or security benefits require taking power away from the sysadmin. Yes, they do! That's the whole point of the product. Why would you even trust the sysadmin in the first place? The fact of the matter is that a lot of data leaks have been caused by insiders - either willingly or via social engineering. This technology provides a method of closing this loophole and aims to enable users (not pr…

Its fine to say dont buy such hardware. The concern is what happens if thats all AMD, Intel and qualcomm sell to people. Apple already does this with the iPhones and tablets, and unless you find a bootrom exploit good luck running an other OS on the device. You also start running into problems where more software and content may require such hardware.

> Apple already does this with the iPhones and tablets, and unless you find a bootrom exploit good luck running an other OS on the device.

These devices are not general computing devices (according to Apple), so in their mind that's fine. It also makes no difference to the customer since alternatives exist.

The fact that pretty much all other products in the smartphone and tablet market are inferior in terms of hardware, quality and software doesn't matter.

> You also start running into problems where more software and content may require such hardware.

So? If anything, this opens a market for software and hardware that doesn't require it, don't you think? For every Steam and Epic Game Store there's a Good Old Games [1] is what I'm saying. Just another great reason to support and use FOSS, no?

[1] https://www.gog.com

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#156

Post by qayxc »

GeekyBear wrote: post #86
qayxc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not something I want in my general-purpose computing device where I am the owner. Consoles aren't general computing devices, though. Apple disagrees with your idea of ownership, too ;) and so do the customers who Pluton is targeted at - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/windows10... The whole project isn't targeted at end-users. It's IoT, businesses, hospitals, government agencies, utility c…

> Consoles aren't general computing devices, though. Consoles are absolutely general computing devices. Microsoft just uses DRM to prevent you from running non approved software.

> Consoles are absolutely general computing devices.

Repeating a false statement doesn't make it true.

A general computation device is a device that manipulates data without detailed, step-by step control by human hand and is designed to be used for many different types of problems.

A gaming console is strictly not designed to be used for many different types problems. It's a piece of hardware designed to run a specific vendor-sanctioned class of video games and in some cases provide limited media playback capabilities.

It uses specially designed hardware for that purpose, which is different in many ways from general computer hardware (specialised SoCs, proprietary storage solutions, etc.).

Sure, it's perfectly possible to use a passenger jet as a demolition device for multi-storey buildings, but that doesn't mean that they're in same device class as demolition equipment. The type of a device derives from its intended use, not potential uses. That's why a nail gun isn't sold as a hunting weapon even though it ticks almost every box of being a firearm.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#158

Post by sterwill »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #147
xvilka wrote: post #78

I wonder if it will be one of the inferior technologies that were forced by Microsoft even outside of their Windows world. Like it happened with UEFI (that has no multithreading, uses PE as a format, Microsoft C ugly coding convention, bloated), SecureBoot (that was designed to stop anything non-Windows instead of real security), UTF-16 (everyone except them and JavaScript uses UTF-8), and so on. The list is long.

Well, it could be worse. Python did the whole Py3k own-goal purely for the purpose of forcing everyone onto UTF-16. (Facepalm, yes.)

I wasn't following the Python 2-to-3 transition that closely, but I don't think Python ever forced anyone to use UTF-16. On Unix platforms (the only place I've used Python for 10 years) the strings are UTF-8 internally. On Windows maybe it's UTF-16, I don't know, but most programmers don't need to know or care. They just bytes(my_string, 'utf-8') to encode it as bytes.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#159

Post by Mindwipe »

josh2600 wrote: post #70
darzu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Azure Sphere, Pluton didn't do any direct network communication, that was all handled by the main core. Also there was no cellular so the whole system depended on user interaction to get online. When the main core wanted to talk to the Azure Sphere cloud service (from Linux user land), it would go through a remote attestation process that involved Pluton. Pluton can securely track what software was booted on the m…

I guess I’m wondering how Pluton and SGX coexist...

I think you should assume Pluton will be used instead of SGX, which is so broken nobody has any confidence in it any more.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#160

Post by The-loan-wolf »

wahern wrote: post #33
merb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well apple's enclave is broken aswell. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/apple... well at least it needs physical access.

FWIW, I meant Apple secure enclave hacks get all the attention because they're more of an achievement, at least in terms of published hacks being more rare. I tried to keep track of published Qualcomm breaks--which usually don't require physical access as they involve classic software bugs--several years ago but gave up because they were too numerous yet not as widely publicized. I had plenty of fodder by then, thoug…

A curated list of public TEE resources for learning how to reverse-engineer and achieve trusted code execution on ARM devices (include all major ARM silicon vendor) https://github.com/enovella/TEE-reversing
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