Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

blog.quarkslab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#21

Post by tialaramex »

userbinator wrote: post #6

A lot of software can be cracked "with only one byte". Finding which one is the hard part. Don't lose sight of the fact that the purpose of this and other TPM-like devices is to hide secrets from its owner.

> hide secrets from its owner.

It makes sense to use exactly the same technology even if you are "the owner" unless you are somehow only ever running software you wrote on data you obtained, and maybe not even then if other people are able to influence that data.

Most of use a lot of software we didn't write, to process data we got from some third party who may or may not have our best interests in mind.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#22

Post by ClumsyPilot »

userbinator wrote: post #6

A lot of software can be cracked "with only one byte". Finding which one is the hard part. Don't lose sight of the fact that the purpose of this and other TPM-like devices is to hide secrets from its owner.

well there are cases where owner and current user aren't one and the same. Like an ATM terminal, or when someone else is using your computer.

The whole security landscape seems to have many catch-22's

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#23

Post by ZeroCool2u »

medo-bear wrote: post #17
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

i would imagine higher bounty would be for extracting device keys. from my reading this exploit would not allow you to extract the key needed to unlock a powered off device. im no security expert so please correct me if im wrong

>2022-06-20: Quarkslab sent Google a new exploit that demonstrates code execution on the chip and exfiltration of encryption keys from it. A detailed description of the exploitation technique, the exploit's source code, and a video showing its use to exfiltrate a StrongBox-protected AES key were provided.

This sounds close enough to me, but perhaps there's some subtle nuance between device keys and other keys in the chip.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#24

Post by medo-bear »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #23
medo-bear wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would imagine higher bounty would be for extracting device keys. from my reading this exploit would not allow you to extract the key needed to unlock a powered off device. im no security expert so please correct me if im wrong

>2022-06-20: Quarkslab sent Google a new exploit that demonstrates code execution on the chip and exfiltration of encryption keys from it. A detailed description of the exploitation technique, the exploit's source code, and a video showing its use to exfiltrate a StrongBox-protected AES key were provided. This sounds close enough to me, but perhaps there's some subtle nuance between device keys and other keys in the…

> perhaps there's some subtle nuance between device keys and other keys in the chip.

Thats what im wondering too. particularly this line from mitigations section from the report

>> However, we do want to point out an interesting feature that would have made the StrongBox key blob leak impossible. Indeed, an application can create a key that is authentication-bound, specifying setUserAuthenticationRequired(true) when building it with KeyGenParameterSpec. This way, users need to authenticate before using the key and the key blob is encrypted a second time using a special key derived from the user password that we do not have.

so unless your phone doesnt have a password i dont see how they can retrieve device keys

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#26

Post by rob_c »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

I think the $1M is probably reserved to something that would tank Google stock imo, but maybe I'm cynical

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#27

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

From my point of view, the fact that the exploit required either to run as root on a rooted device (or alternatively direct access to an internal serial bus) is enough to justify not paying at the top level.

These things should probably be more transparent, but I would assume the $1M level would be for exploits that could be deployed on a fresh-from-the-box device with no rooting/mods.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#28

Post by dylan604 »

rob_c wrote: post #26
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

I think the $1M is probably reserved to something that would tank Google stock imo, but maybe I'm cynical

Nah, you're not cynical enough. My cynical take is there is nothing they would ever pay $1M for. "Up to" is a marketing term to get people to think that if they work hard enough, they might qualify for this mythical unicorn bounty, but at the end of the day they just get peanuts.

Re: Attacking Titan M with Only One Byte

#30

Post by medo-bear »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #27
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #2

This is an elegant attack that effectively compromises all Titan M chips. They were even able to dump all securely stored private cryptographic keys, which Google acknowledges in the disclosure timeline. Even still though, the award Google initially gave was only $10k USD(!). They finally bumped it to $75k USD after complaint and review, but Google's bug bounty program claims up to $1 Million USD. If fully compromisi…

From my point of view, the fact that the exploit required either to run as root on a rooted device (or alternatively direct access to an internal serial bus) is enough to justify not paying at the top level. These things should probably be more transparent, but I would assume the $1M level would be for exploits that could be deployed on a fresh-from-the-box device with no rooting/mods.

is isb access an issue? your phone could get stolen
Post reply on HN