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My business card runs Linux

dmitry.gr

11–20 of 143 posts

Re: My business card runs Linux

#11
post #6

"Hey, stranger! Here's my card. Plug it into your computer's USB slot." Cool project, but as a business card, making someone think they're about to install Stuxnet might not be the best first impression. Heh.

Maybe make it an unshielded USB-A connector and don't implement pins 2 and 3, so there's only the 5v and ground pins.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#12

It doesn't fix the software side, but I wonder if projects like this are a reasonable solution to hardware-based trusting trust worries. The real hardware is unlikely to know what it's being used for, and Linux is running in a custom VM that's tiny enough to audit.

What, just based off of the custom-ness of the device? I think the endgame of this type of security-by-obscurity is like a randomized FPGA computer trying to fool a hypervisor in the same chip.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#14
post #10
post #6

"Hey, stranger! Here's my card. Plug it into your computer's USB slot." Cool project, but as a business card, making someone think they're about to install Stuxnet might not be the best first impression. Heh.

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: My business card runs Linux

#15
post #6

"Hey, stranger! Here's my card. Plug it into your computer's USB slot." Cool project, but as a business card, making someone think they're about to install Stuxnet might not be the best first impression. Heh.

Disappointed seeing a negative comment at the top.

This is a COOL project: BADASS even. You’re not technically wrong, but the world advances much more via optimism than pessimism.

To the creator: Rock On Dude. So so so cool.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#16
post #6

"Hey, stranger! Here's my card. Plug it into your computer's USB slot." Cool project, but as a business card, making someone think they're about to install Stuxnet might not be the best first impression. Heh.

Maybe make it an unshielded USB-A connector and don't implement pins 2 and 3, so there's only the 5v and ground pins.

If you have no way to reach the console, how do you know it's running Linux? Or doing anything at all really? The card has no way to display anything by itself.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#17
post #15
post #6

"Hey, stranger! Here's my card. Plug it into your computer's USB slot." Cool project, but as a business card, making someone think they're about to install Stuxnet might not be the best first impression. Heh.

Disappointed seeing a negative comment at the top. This is a COOL project: BADASS even. You’re not technically wrong, but the world advances much more via optimism than pessimism. To the creator: Rock On Dude. So so so cool.

I agree it's cool; that's why I prefaced everything with "Cool project".

> the world advances much more via optimism than pessimism

I don't think that's a slogan infosec folks frequently adopt.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#18
post #3

Past HN thread on a similar project that had a lot of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871026

I had deja vu and was about to check the date to suggest adding it to the title but whoa, it's a different one with the exact same title.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disappointed seeing a negative comment at the top. This is a COOL project: BADASS even. You’re not technically wrong, but the world advances much more via optimism than pessimism. To the creator: Rock On Dude. So so so cool.

I agree it's cool; that's why I prefaced everything with "Cool project". > the world advances much more via optimism than pessimism I don't think that's a slogan infosec folks frequently adopt.

Infosec folks should live a little. You can have more than one computer and not everyone is a head of state.

Re: My business card runs Linux

#20

It doesn't fix the software side, but I wonder if projects like this are a reasonable solution to hardware-based trusting trust worries. The real hardware is unlikely to know what it's being used for, and Linux is running in a custom VM that's tiny enough to audit.

What, just based off of the custom-ness of the device? I think the endgame of this type of security-by-obscurity is like a randomized FPGA computer trying to fool a hypervisor in the same chip.

More or less, yes. A backdoor has to be able to pattern match to find what it's backdooring; the more custom your implementation is the harder that should be. AIUI, it would be easy to make, say, a CPU that recognizes gcc doing a compile natively. It would be, I think, extremely difficult to create a CPU that recognizes the instructions to emulate a MIPS processor running gcc, especially when the emulator didn't even exist when the chip was taped out.
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