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Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#12[deleted]
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#13Google has 3 Titans.
1) Titan for GCP servers: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/titan-in-depth-se... (custom hardware, custom software)
2) Security key: https://cloud.google.com/titan-security-key/ ("built with a hardware chip that includes firmware engineered by Google" - seemingly stock hardware, custom software)
3) Titan M mobile: (TFA, custom hardware/software like #1 but for mobile)
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#14> Titan M's CPU is an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor specially hardened against side-channel attacks and augmented with defensive features to detect and respond to abnormal conditions.
It would be nice to see this being replaced by an an open-source RISC-V processor in the future, too.
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#15How does the latest Google's hardware compare to the latest Apple's hardware in terms of security? Can Pixel and Pixelbook now be recommended to journalists[1] as reasonable alternatives to iPhone and iPad, or are Apple's products still much better in this regard?
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#16> For example, packing as many security features into Titan M's 64 Kbytes of RAM required all firmware to execute exclusively off the stack. Do what now? Edit: seriously what does that sentence mean? Executing off the stack is super dangerous. Even on an M3 you can (and should) setup the MPU to have a non executable stack.
It means the firmware does not have a heap for dynamic allocation, not that it's generating and executing code in buffers on the stack.
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#17How does the latest Google's hardware compare to the latest Apple's hardware in terms of security? Can Pixel and Pixelbook now be recommended to journalists[1] as reasonable alternatives to iPhone and iPad, or are Apple's products still much better in this regard? [1] https://techsolidarity.org/resources/basic_security.htm
I'm pretty sure the Pixel 2 had hardware keystore security on par with an iPhone 6/7, which is what that suggests.
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#18>Last, but not least, to prevent tampering, Titan M is built with insider attack resistance. The firmware on Titan M will never be updated unless you have entered your passcode, meaning bad actors cannot bypass your lock screen to update the firmware to a malicious version.
very explicit threat-modeling with the FBI in mind
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#19> Titan M's CPU is an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor specially hardened against side-channel attacks and augmented with defensive features to detect and respond to abnormal conditions. It would be nice to see this being replaced by an an open-source RISC-V processor in the future, too.
Something I've been worried a bit about with RISC-V, hopefully someone can tell me why I'm wrong. If I were implementing some cryptography in assembly on x86 or ARM I would make every effort to avoid branches and use conditional moves instead so as to be more resistant to timing attacks. Is this actually a common technique in computer security? And does RISC-V suffer from not having conditional moves?
Re: Building a Titan: Better security through a tiny chip
#20I recently bought a few Titan products (the security key) - I was pretty bummed to find out that it had none of the features claimed by the Titan family.
No Side Channel Attack resistance.
No fuses to attest supply chain provenance or lifecycle.
No direct connections for FIDO hardening.
Apprantly the Titan keys given to Google employees were different than the Titan keys sold to the public. Themselves different from the Titan M used in Servers and Phones and now Chromebooks. None of this would matter so much other than the fact that products sole purpose is to establish a secure chain of trust and starts out the gate broken with ambiguous or misleading claims.
This is frustrating because the Titan M is an absolutely brilliant device, with some real advancements to normalize embedded security, including an SPI interposer to monitor communications (a real leap forward) - and should not at all be conflated with a generic, whitelabeled, non-hsm product that makes no claims whatsoever.