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Security research on Private Cloud Compute

security.apple.com

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Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#41

Post by kfreds »

threeseed wrote: post #39
kfreds wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what does open hardware mean? Great question. Most hardware projects I've seen that market themselves as open source hardware provide the schematic and PCB design, but still use ICs that are proprietary. One of my companies, Tillitis, uses an FPGA as the main IC, and we provide the hardware design configured on the FPGA. Still, the FPGA itself is proprietary. Another aspect to consider is whether you can audit and…

And what attestation do you have that the FPGA isn't compromised. We can play this game all the way down.

You're right. It is very hard, if not impossible, to get absolute guarantees. Having said that, FPGAs can make supply chain attacks harder. See my other comments in this thread.

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#42

Post by password4321 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #24
kfreds wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like this is all smoke and mirrors to redirect from the likelihood intentional silicon backdoors that are effectively undetectable. The technologies Apple PCC is using has real benefits and is most certainly not "all smoke and mirrors". Reproducible builds, remote attestation and transparency logging are individually useful, and the combination of them even more so. As for the likelihood of Apple launching A…

Apple forgot to disable some cache debugging registers a while back which in effect was similar to something GP described, although exploitation required root privileges and would allow circumventing their in-kernel protections; protections most other systems do not have. (And they still didn't manage to achieve persistence, despite having beyond-root privileges).

20231227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112 Operation Triangulation: What you get when attack iPhones of researchers

20231229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38801275 Kaspersky discloses iPhone hardware feature vital in Operation Triangulation

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#43

Post by layer8 »

mmastrac wrote: post #5

I feel like this is all smoke and mirrors to redirect from the likelihood intentional silicon backdoors that are effectively undetectable. Without open silicon, there's no way to detect that -- say -- when registers r0-rN are set to values [A, ..., N] and a jump to address 0xCONSTANT occurs, additional access is granted to a monitor process. Of course, this limits the potential attackers to 1) exactly one government…

With virtualized hardware the backdoor doesn’t even strictly need to be in silicon.

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#44

Post by layer8 »

aabhay wrote: post #27

A lot of people seem to be focusing on how this program isn’t sufficient as a guarantee, but those people are missing the point. The real value of this system is that Apple is making legally enforceable claims about their system. Shareholders can, and do, sue companies that make inaccurate claims about their infrastructure. I’m 100% sure that Apple’s massive legal team would never let this kind of program exist if _t…

Unfortunately that doesn’t help anyone outside the US, not because of differences in the legal systems, but because as an American company Apple will always have to defer to the US agencies first.

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#45

Post by stouset »

mmastrac wrote: post #5

I feel like this is all smoke and mirrors to redirect from the likelihood intentional silicon backdoors that are effectively undetectable. Without open silicon, there's no way to detect that -- say -- when registers r0-rN are set to values [A, ..., N] and a jump to address 0xCONSTANT occurs, additional access is granted to a monitor process. Of course, this limits the potential attackers to 1) exactly one government…

If you take as a fundamental assumption that all your hardware is backdoored by Mossad who has unlimited resources and capacity to intercept and process all your traffic, the game is already lost and there’s no point in doing anything.

If instead you assume your attackers have limited resources, things like this increase the costs attackers have to spend to compromise targets, reducing the number of viable targets and/or the depth to which they can penetrate them.

One of these threat models is actually useful.

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#46

Post by russelg »

danielhep wrote: post #22
dewey wrote: post #2

Looks like they are really writing everything in Swift on the server side. Repo: https://github.com/apple/security-pcc

Is using something other than XCode viable? I'd love to do more with swift but I hate that IDE.

If you're a Jetbrains user, they have their AppCode IDE.

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#48

Post by [deleted] »

kfreds wrote: post #17

I've been working on technology like this for the past six years. The benefits of transparent systems are likely considerable. The combination of reproducible builds, remote attestation and transparency logging allows trivial detection of a range of supply chain attacks. It can allow users to retroactively audit the source code of remote running systems. Yes, there are attacks that the threat model doesn't protect ag…

[deleted]

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#49

Post by aabhay »

layer8 wrote: post #44
aabhay wrote: post #27

A lot of people seem to be focusing on how this program isn’t sufficient as a guarantee, but those people are missing the point. The real value of this system is that Apple is making legally enforceable claims about their system. Shareholders can, and do, sue companies that make inaccurate claims about their infrastructure. I’m 100% sure that Apple’s massive legal team would never let this kind of program exist if _t…

Unfortunately that doesn’t help anyone outside the US, not because of differences in the legal systems, but because as an American company Apple will always have to defer to the US agencies first.

I’m pretty sure a foreign shareholder can sue in a US court of law. While I agree that “shareholder” in this case means extra-massive moneyed entity, I firmly believe that even this provides a deterrence effect. At the very least, for the scale of operations in the US, there’s an extremely high trust environment. That level of trust doesn’t exist even for orders of magnitude smaller issues in most other countries

Re: Security research on Private Cloud Compute

#50

Post by saagarjha »

aabhay wrote: post #49
layer8 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that doesn’t help anyone outside the US, not because of differences in the legal systems, but because as an American company Apple will always have to defer to the US agencies first.

I’m pretty sure a foreign shareholder can sue in a US court of law. While I agree that “shareholder” in this case means extra-massive moneyed entity, I firmly believe that even this provides a deterrence effect. At the very least, for the scale of operations in the US, there’s an extremely high trust environment. That level of trust doesn’t exist even for orders of magnitude smaller issues in most other countries

Yes, this is why we don't see bad behavior and willful abuse of the legal system by companies in the US.
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