Inside Yubikey Neo • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside Yubikey Neo

#31

Post by nickpsecurity » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 12:09 AM UTC

kweks wrote: post #24

nickpsecurity wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To support your point, most of the delays in the JackPair Kickstarter involve tooling for the casing. The recent one admits they should've talked to an expert before they even settled on the prototype because they had no idea how much trouble it would cause at manufacturing time. Hence, the popularity of the Design for Manufacturing concept these days...

Tooling and injection molding is an arcane art. Most people would be amazed to realise that the tooling to make even the yubikey would probably be around 45cm x 45cm of (almost) solid steel block. They'd be probably even more surprised to find that it'd cost 10k - 15k to make the tooling. Diagnosing / 'debugging' issues with injection molding is incredibly difficult - again - it's almost black magic, and it's sadly a…

I believe it. Sounds like a market rife for disruption by people that can turn it into a cookbook approach on the cheap. More interesting from a security angle: malicious tooling on packaging side might be used to pre-compromise chips or devices. I haven't seen anyone write on that and I've had to little time to do a paper on it. I'm sure there's a whole cat and mouse game waiting on us that the cats are probably already playing. ;)

Re: Inside Yubikey Neo

#32

Post by hga » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

kweks wrote: post #24

nickpsecurity wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To support your point, most of the delays in the JackPair Kickstarter involve tooling for the casing. The recent one admits they should've talked to an expert before they even settled on the prototype because they had no idea how much trouble it would cause at manufacturing time. Hence, the popularity of the Design for Manufacturing concept these days...

Tooling and injection molding is an arcane art. Most people would be amazed to realise that the tooling to make even the yubikey would probably be around 45cm x 45cm of (almost) solid steel block. They'd be probably even more surprised to find that it'd cost 10k - 15k to make the tooling. Diagnosing / 'debugging' issues with injection molding is incredibly difficult - again - it's almost black magic, and it's sadly a…

Apple justified their purchase of a Cray in part for this use case.

Re: Inside Yubikey Neo

#33

Post by jans23 » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 8:49 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #30

X-Cubed wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitrokey is another one: https://www.nitrokey.com/

Thanks. Nitrokey looks nice. I'll have to look deeper into the github repo to see what it actually supports in hardware though - the website does not mention the smartcard standards that are actually supported.

Nitrokey Pro uses the OpenPGP Card, Nitrokey HSM uses the SmartCard-HSM.

Re: Inside Yubikey Neo

#34

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:01 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #32

kweks wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tooling and injection molding is an arcane art. Most people would be amazed to realise that the tooling to make even the yubikey would probably be around 45cm x 45cm of (almost) solid steel block. They'd be probably even more surprised to find that it'd cost 10k - 15k to make the tooling. Diagnosing / 'debugging' issues with injection molding is incredibly difficult - again - it's almost black magic, and it's sadly a…

Apple justified their purchase of a Cray in part for this use case.

That's something else. You got a link for that?

Re: Inside Yubikey Neo

#35

Post by hga » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:48 PM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #34

hga wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple justified their purchase of a Cray in part for this use case.

That's something else. You got a link for that?

Nope, just contemporaneous memory, and by then I'd learned a lot about manufacturing by working at LMI, so it was something I paid attention to. Try e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+cray+injection+molding... which got me these two top hits:

ftp://ftp.cray.com/announcements/product/OLD/Moldflow_Partnership.930408.txt

http://www.clock.org/~fair/computers/sgi-cray.html

The latter should be authoritative, Eric Fair was an Apple sysadmin in the '80s or thereabouts (and son of the Fair in Fair Issac, the inventors of credit scoring).

And there were quite a few more links I didn't check out.

Re: Inside Yubikey Neo

#36

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 3:06 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #35

nickpsecurity wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something else. You got a link for that?

Nope, just contemporaneous memory, and by then I'd learned a lot about manufacturing by working at LMI, so it was something I paid attention to. Try e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+cray+injection+molding... which got me these two top hits: ftp://ftp.cray.com/announcements/product/OLD/Moldflow_Partnership.930408.txt http://www.clock.org/~fair/computers/sgi-cray.html The latter should be authoritative, Eric…

That's a trip! I didn't consider the need for a supercomputer because I knew so little about the topic. Yet, the text file reminds me of the descriptions on solving fluid dynamics problems where they had to do intensive simulations to measure behavior of fluid in some situation. That's always advertised by supercomputer vendors. Seems molding has similar requirements.

Extra funny if that exchange between Scully and Cray happened. One of computing's more interesting synchronicities. :)

Btw, I recently found out that Cray had another company making a play in reconfigurable market. He died in a car accident but they followed through with interesting technology:

http://srccomputers.com/