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

Memory Integrity Enforcement

security.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 259 posts

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#211

Post by kevincox »

dns_snek wrote: post #209
kevincox wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but it exists now. Maybe if more people demanded this hardware then it would be more popular and not at risk of extinction. I don't know what rhetoric you are taking about? Recommending buying stuff that supports your wishes seems like pretty reasonable advice.

> I don't know what rhetoric you are taking about. The rhetoric of blaming consumers for buying the wrong product when they complain about hostile features on Apple's side of the duopoly, and then blaming them again when they switch to Android and complain about hostile features on that side. The rhetoric of blaming the consumers for simply "not demanding" what we want with enough conviction. It's an asinine thing to…

Fair point. I think in general it is important to remember that. There are negatives to each corner of the market so a consumer can't make a perfect choice.

But in this specific case I think it does still seem strange to raise a concern that one of the most notorious locked down vendors is shipping a security improvement because it also makes it harder to get full device access.

Maybe a better way of phrasing my point is that the problem isn't that these devices are secure, that is a good feature. The problem is that Apple doesn't let you control the device. I would focus my complaints on the latter, not complain about every security improvement because it also happens to contribute to the real problem.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#212

Post by pizlonator »

zarzavat wrote: post #169
pizlonator wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. That’s why I’m adding the caveat that this doesn’t protect you against attackers that are in a position to try multiple times

Detection is 14/15ths of the battle. Forcing attackers to produce a brand new exploit chain every few weeks massively increases attack cost which could make it uneconomical except for national security targets.

It will be really interesting to see how well that part of the story works out!

What we're essentially saying is that evading detection is now 14/15 of the battle, from the attacker's perspective. Those people are very clever

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#213

Post by amelius »

pizlonator wrote: post #20

This is really impressive. It’s my understanding that this won’t protect you in the case where the attacker has a chance to try multiple times. The approach would be something like: go out of bounds far enough to skip the directly adjacent object, or do a use after free with a lot of grooming, so that you get a a chance of getting a matching tag. The probability of getting a matching tag is 1/16. But this post doesn’…

It also won't help with supply-chain attacks. Executed by e.g. a state actor who is playing the long game.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#214

Post by orbital-decay »

kevincox wrote: post #204
dns_snek wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy hardware that supports running your own software without fighting you. It will be very hard to buy something that won't exist in the near future. This rhetoric should've died a decade ago.

Maybe, but it exists now. Maybe if more people demanded this hardware then it would be more popular and not at risk of extinction. I don't know what rhetoric you are taking about? Recommending buying stuff that supports your wishes seems like pretty reasonable advice.

Voting with your wallet doesn't work when the overwhelming majority does want to be locked up.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#215

Post by orbital-decay »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

I think hackers are not ready for the idea that unhackable hardware might actually be here. Hardware that will never have an exploit found someday, never be jailbroken, never have piracy, outside of maybe nation-state attacks. Xbox One, 2012? Never hacked. Nintendo Switch 2, 2025? According to reverse engineers... flawlessly secure microkernel and secure monitor built over the Switch 1 generation. Meanwhile NVIDIA's…

Unhackable and backdoored. Operation Triangulation would have been impossible without Apple backdooring their own hardware.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#216

Post by johnisgood »

userbinator wrote: post #163
aloha2436 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIE will make sure we can never take back our freedom. Is the implication here that making phones more secure is... bad? Because it makes jailbreaks harder to develop?

Yes, absolutely. Just like any weapon, "security" is only good if it's in your control. When the noose is around your neck, you'd better hope it easily breaks.

That is a good way to put it, stealing it.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#217

Post by johnisgood »

orbital-decay wrote: post #214
kevincox wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but it exists now. Maybe if more people demanded this hardware then it would be more popular and not at risk of extinction. I don't know what rhetoric you are taking about? Recommending buying stuff that supports your wishes seems like pretty reasonable advice.

Voting with your wallet doesn't work when the overwhelming majority does want to be locked up.

Maybe it is not that they want to be locked up, but they are clueless / don't care. It sucks when the reason for why we can't have nice things is... the majority of people, doesn't it? In politics they would just say democracy at work, and believe me, people are just as clueless about that as they are with technology / privacy / security.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#218

Post by LeakedCanary »

axoltl wrote: post #162
LeakedCanary wrote: post #159

> ... With Enhanced MTE, we instead specify that accessing non-tagged memory from a tagged memory region requires knowing that region’s tag, ... I got a bit confused when reading this. What does it mean to "know the tag" if the memory region is untagged?

I believe they mean the source region's tag, rather than the destination.

Not sure if I understand this correctly:

If an attacker somehow gains out-of-bounds write capability for a tagged memory region (via a pointer that points to that region, I assume), they could potentially write into a non-tagged memory region. Since the destination region is untagged, there would be no tag check against the pointer’s tag, effectively bypassing EMTE.

> I believe they mean the source region's tag, rather than the destination.

But in the previous case, the pointer the attacker uses should already carry the source region’s tag, so it’s still unclear if this is what they meant.

I’m not sure which attack scenario they had in mind when they said this. It would help if they provided a concrete attack example.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#219

Post by apaprocki »

Whether you like it or not, we are in an echo chamber. We will all benefit more rapidly once we figure out how to explain to an everyday Joe Blow why this technology is necessary in their daily life to get them hyped to upgrade their cracked XR/XS/11 barely hanging onto life support.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#220

Post by spaceribs »

ysofunny wrote: post #85
spaceribs wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, unless we balkanize our systems and services.

> That is, unless we balkanize our systems and services. ...all the way back to pen and paper

I wouldn't be surprised for certain kinds of secret sharing. Storage is cheap and sneaker-nets are easy. I'm sure someone is figuring out a network solution where 2 computers both have a 100tb hard drive with the same one-time pad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

Post reply on HN