61–70 of 179 posts
Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess, Lifting the Fog on Red Star OS - A deep dive into the surveillance features of North Korea's operating system [1] [1] - https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star... (it's also available on YT which for some reason I couldn't link in this comment - perhaps some anti-spam measurment?) The bit more detailed view, I'd say
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, virt engineer here. Partly because it a very hard problem (in fact, theoretically impossible if you include timing attacks), but mainly because you don't need to emulate the hardware very accurately in order to get common operating systems to run. Getting them to run is all that we're paid to do, and that's a difficult enough job already. One strange aspect of this is that only a narrow range of current OSes run…
How does software-based x86 emulation (ie OG Connectix Virtual PC) compare to current hardware-assisted virtualization? Were older methods more cycle accurate than what’s in use now?
Anyways to answer your question, Virtual PC and VirtualBox can fully run old as well as new software, and the performance hit is not that bad (I ran multiple virtualized Windows Servers when a PC had 1GB of RAM). However more modern virtualization methods can offer bare metal-like performance, which Virtual PC/Virtualbox will never be able to make.
"The system is absolutely network-silent except when you actively do something that requires network access, like using the browser. It does not call the mothership, not for updates, not for telemetry, not to let Kim Jong Un know the status of your internal organs. Spoiler, he doesn’t give a fuck about your hentai porn. " Take that, Microsoft!
This is something that black-box testing can never really verify. Behavior could be altered by the VM, by detecting that it's not in NK, be triggered sometime later, after typing an entry from a list, and so on. And it's not like Microsoft gives too much fuck about anyone's hentai porn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> add a signature belonging to your install of the machine to pictures and video files But why?
The KGB used to require all typewriters to be registered, so they could identify the authors of anything they found objectionable. Being able to track who produced an image that's doing the rounds spreading "propaganda" seems like it adds a lot of value (from an authoritarian point of view, at least).
I would pay to read a newspaper that (somewhat satirically) reported on the US the way we report on our adversaries. Complete with referring to police as "security forces", including wild speculations about the backstabbing behind-the-scenes of their top politics, etc.
this always looked surprisingly well polished to me.
Why is it surprising that the top 1% programmers of an entire country (many of them probably with western education) can produce quality software when put under deadly threat?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I talked to a security researcher about it a few years ago and as I understood it it's a cat and mouse game. They are trying to mimic real phones but the malware authors always find a new way to tell whether it's fake.
I’m not aware of any steps security researches take to obscure the fact they are running in a VM from malware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumes that’s how they are motivated. We also know quality suffers with a gun to your head. They are far more likely to produce quality work by patriotism or material rewards.
I don't think they had a gun to their head literally, or that the threat was voiced - but IMHO not many of them would defy the order and definitely would not try to make the project slow down or fail, due to the implied threat of "disappearance". > They are far more likely to produce quality work by patriotism or material rewards. Is that really what you feel as a programmer that has to take free and open software an…