7 ms·

Intel Software Guard Extensions – Memory Encryption Engine

81 points by mrb 11y ago

gruez 11y ago
Can someone explain to me why intel is implementing these features? Surely no consumer wants them, so I don't see how it gives them an edge over amd. plus they're leagues ahead of amd already. The only explanation I can think of is that supporters of DRM are somehow subsidizing intel's development efforts.
- xenophonf 11y ago
  Memory encryption makes cold-boot attacks unfeasible. I doubt someone could decap a processor fast enough in order to mount a cold-boot attack on the keying material stored inside of it. I see this as a natural step in the evolution of Trusted Computing, so Intel's interest in such technology doesn't surprise me.
  - m_eiman 11y ago
    It also makes it hard to do things like Thunderstrike or whatever the "read secrets in RAM via DMA from attached devices" issue is called.
- SXX 11y ago
  Surely no consumer wants them In real life almost everyone use services with DRM and proprietary software some of which contain "secret sauce" that developers want to remain secret. People that use such services and software already voted for technologies like this to be developed.
  - xorblurb 11y ago
    99% of them did not even know exactly what they "voted" for...
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    > voted for technologies Some may have, but few - even in technical crows - are making fully informed decisions. Often, what is seen as a vote for modern technology is actually resignation* and felling powerless in the face of rapid changes. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-fallacy-how-marketers-are-misrepresenting-american-consumers-and https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-...
- htns 11y ago
  This would prevent row hammer attacks and detect memory errors in general, so it ought to be of general interest even if it isn't.
  - kyled 11y ago
    Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this won't protect dram from row hammer attacks. You still can access memory cells and cause other bits to flip. Doesn't matter if the content is encrypted or not.
    - htns 11y ago
      Bit flips will be detected on the next read via MAC failure. Bit flips can still be obnoxious, but they are prevented in the sense the CPU will start a reboot before accepting corrupt memory.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- munin 11y ago
  let's say that I want to do some secure banking, so I fire up the secure banking app and off I go. problem: what if my whole operating system is owned, right down to the keyboard interrupt handler? everything I do with this secure banking app is compromised. okay, so instead what if I could put all the keyboard I/O, all the network I/O, the code, and the data, of the secure banking app into a trusted enclave, where the trusted enclave is cryptographically signed and verified from the BIOS up? now the OS can be totally owned but it can't read anything that goes on inside, or comes out of, this little enclave that's doing my banking. that would be cool, right? now what if you could do that for all kinds of apps, like your email, and your web browser, and your key agent, and so on. and they're all in different secure enclaves that can't interfere with each other, and the host operating system can't reach in and touch their memory. wouldn't that be cool?
  - teraflop 11y ago
    If I'm understanding this correctly, it doesn't provide any kind of protection against a compromised operating system. How could it? The encryption is transparent to applications, so the OS could just lie and say that encryption is enabled. What it does provide is protection against hardware attacks like memory bus snooping, or chilling and extracting DRAM modules.
    - anonymousDan 11y ago
      Not necessarily, depends on what exactly you put in the enclave. It's possible to design a system where the OS lives outside the enclave in untrusted memory. The assurance that your enclave memory is protected is provided by the hardware, and can be confirmed remotely by an attestation protocol. For more information I would recommend checking out a paper by Microsoft Research called "Shielding applications from an untrusted cloud with Haven" from OSDI' 14.
      - therein 11y ago
        Ring -1?
      - 11y ago
- sweis 11y ago
  I have seen strong interest in SGX among some large Intel customers.
- zvrba 11y ago
  Confidential computing in the cloud, for example.
- zurn 11y ago
  CPU manufacturers have too much chip real estate to know what to do with: The processor cores must be kept physically small to keep them fast. Multicore has predictably hit the software wall at 2-4 cores[1][2]. Caches also have diminishing returns (every doubling of the cache size gets 5-10% perf boost). Intel has been adding features left and right where they can, and apparently the onchip memory controller is still simple enough to add more features to without performance hit. This is helped by memory being glacially slow compared to what happens in the CPU. Biggest slice of Intel's x86 profits come from data centers (and that slice of pie is increasing), a major bottleneck of server workloads moving to "the cloud" is the lack of sound technical means to keep your data safe. [1] Servers can use more cores but they can ditch the onchip GPU. GPU eats 4-8 cores worth of area in latest designs. [2] Even in games, despite performance obsession and heroic optimization efforts, and pressure to squeeze most out of the ~8 cores in consoles: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/05/quadcore-gaming/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/05/quadcore-gaming/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Interesting they haven't been able to conjure a desktop and mobile CPU which supports ECC RAM.
    - witty_username 11y ago
      Most modern AMD processors support ECC. It's purely a artificial limitation as they want businesses to buy more expensive processors from the Xeon line.
  - someguydave 11y ago
    > CPU manufacturers have too much chip real estate to know what to do with: Agreed. Ultimately if Intel continues down this 'closed IP' route, their processor monopoly is going to be replaced with generic logic (FPGA-like processors) which will be dynamically programmable.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  [ assume any use of the word "you" is "you (HN readers in general)" ] Intel and Microsoft et al[1] have been trying to lock down the PC for a long time. This is just the latest version of what used to be known as "Trusted Computing". You may have heard about it in the early/mid 2000s by the name "Palladium"[2]. Why? It's partly a very-misguided approach to "security" (which is often defined as security for the software vendor, not the owner of the machine, aka DRM), and this crosses over into the attempts at extending copyright into some sort of property right trump card[3], but this is really best described as the main battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing. General purpose ("Turing complete") computers are incredibly powerful, and that power scares a lot of people that are used to selling goods with single/fixed purpose (e.g. an "appliance"), and people that are used to being arbiters of a scarce resource (e.g. pre-digital publishing). The best description of this War is probably Cory Doctorow's incredible talk[4] at 28c3. Contrary to Doctorow's optimism that we would win this war, developments like SGX and Intel ME suggest we are actually losing ground rapidly[5]. It's easy to understand the desire to enforce DRM, but the problem is significantly broader, because as John Deere has shown us, these technologies will soon be in "everything". It's one thing to say you are going to jailbreak a phone or work around DRM on a PC. You may be perfectly fine with boycotting MPAA films. You may be fine with installing Linux or BSD in response to the Windows 10 fiasco. However, remember how hard it's getting to buy a TV without the "smart" junk. It's going to be a lot harder avoid these problems when it's your car. Again I suggest watching Doctorow's even more important followup talk, "The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing"[6]. These problems need to be solved now, and we need to start establishing proper legal frameworks to protect user rights, because those rights are rapidly being appropriated. There is a tendency among engineers to avoid political topics and to focus on on technical issues. That is no longer an option, because abstaining from this fight is de facto choosing to let the people trying to hide the General Purpose Computer where nobody can use it. There is no neutral ground when the world is burning[7]. "It taught us that we have to create the future .. or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have care for one another, because if we don't, who will?" - Ivanova (Babylon 5, "Sleeping in Light") [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group (formerly the TCPA) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi... [3] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ (a well-known example) [4] http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg [5] HN doesn't like to hear this - this is easily the fastest way I've seen to earn downvotes - but another big way we are losing the War On General Purpose Computing is the normalization of the "app store". Apple started this with the original iPhone (and later iOS in general), and now an entire generation of programmers think it's just fine that they have to ask a business for permission to publish their software. (jailbreaking doesn't count) [6] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE
- mtgx 11y ago
  You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Intel is doing this because it's so far ahead of AMD and they have their customers locked-in, so they think they can do whatever they want to their customers' PCs. It's a shame Google actively tried to push Intel chips in Chromebooks over ARM, when ChromeOS is virtually completely architecture agnostic, and that Microsoft killed Windows RT, too. If those things wouldn't have happened we would see Intel more in a panic mode by now, as "high-end" ARM chips start taking over sub-$400 notebooks. Before you say "but Intel's chips are so much more powerful for $400 machines" - not they aren't. Intel has transitioned to using almost completely Atom chips (ARM chips' direct competitors) for sub-$400 machines and the OEMs went along with it, paying them ~3-5x what they would pay for an ARM chip of the same or better performance. All thanks to Intel's monopoly in PCs.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    ARM has their own version of this (ARM TrustZone CryptoCell).
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Wow, I did not think Intel would go this far in the general purpose CPU line. There has always been a small set of people with "cost no object" requirements for security (thing 3 letter agencies) but if you get this in a "normal" chip I could imagine it being used for copy protection of many forms, or for enterprise security laptops. I does shut down the "but you can snoop memory anyway with the GPU" loophole.
transpute 11y ago
Note that Intel signs [1] software which runs in SGX enclaves. Windows 10 uses [2][3] SGX. Intel got a pretty long patent on SGX a few years ago. In it, they say that the launch enclave will only issue launch tokens after ensuring that the enclave's author has a business agreement with Intel. The patent also states that they expect enclaves to be useful for DRM, so I'm guessing they want to insert themselves into the entertainment content distribution systems and collect some royalties. [1] https://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/ https://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over... [2] http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows%2010%20Fall%20Update.pdf http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows... [3] https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx-sdk/documentation https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx-sdk/documentation
- acqq 11y ago
  Thanks. It seems that signifies game over for software cracks and Intel holding the keys. Please insert the text without the leading spaces, it's unreadable on my mobile phone.
  - acqq 11y ago
    I really mean both of those. Regarding the second point, the good practice here is starting the quote with a single > or if you quote more than one paragraph, simply inserting the whole quote inside of the " " signs. The spaces in front of the lines are supposed to allow code in the comments, and they introduce scrollable boxes in the text and the text is effectively unreadable on smaller screens as it can't be reformatted to the display cell width.
- wsxcde 11y ago
  I'm guessing they want to insert themselves into the entertainment content distribution systems and collect some royalties. AFAIK the initial request for SGX came from the paranoid-types at HFT firms who were worried malware would steal their algorithms or something. The signing mechanism is important because SGX is useless unless you have a trusted way of getting your code into the enclave. The only reasonable way out of this is to have a certificate authority and that's what they're doing. If you think there's a different architecture for SGX that provides the same security guarantees, I'd love to hear about it. Intel has much simpler mechanisms than SGX for enforcing DRM. They've been baking a ton of keys into their processors for many generations now; there was a proposal to stick a few keys in there that belonged to entities like netflix and do all the decryption in hardware. If netflix is going to send us encrypted streams, this is probably the best architecture to handle it, because you can setup a high-performance power-efficient hardware streaming pipeline for decryption and decoding.
jrockway 11y ago
This is only for DRM, right? Very few people are getting viruses because someone has come into their house, connected the DRAM bus on their PC to a logic analyzer, and injected malicious code directly into memory. Instead, the malicious code is coming in through trusted code the user is running (web browser, faulty samba server), which encrypted memory does nothing to protect against. I believe ARM has had this in the form of TrustZone for a while.
- iofj 11y ago
  So I do see a number of advantages : 1) transforms all RAM into ECC RAM 2) consumers may not care, but large server cpu customers certainly will see it as a bonus, some will see it as required. Of course, this won't protect against the NSA. (server cpu customers are the biggest market for intel [1], and also it's the market that's not declining at an alarming rate) [1] http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/moores.law_.chartx519.png http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/m... (if you know a more recent one, do let me know)
  - m_eiman 11y ago
    1) transforms all RAM into ECC RAM Not quite; it doesn't correct errors, just detects them.
- fatratchet 11y ago
  I guess it might help with security of certain thins like full disk encryption. I think there are already devices used by law enforcement or hackers that that can steal disk encyption keys or information just by plugging them into any port with DMA access like firewire or express card. I would assume this could prevent that.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Devices? It's a Github repo: https://github.com/carmaa/inception https://github.com/carmaa/inception
- tptacek 11y ago
rwmj 11y ago
Is it possible to decap a processor without damaging it? (ie. so it will continue to work) If you could do that, then you could attempt to probe the unencrypted data or the key.
- listic 11y ago
  It is, indeed, possible: https://youtu.be/XXs0I5kuoX4?t=2m24s https://youtu.be/XXs0I5kuoX4?t=2m24s Though I don't think it would allow you to probe the unencrypted data or the key. Not at the connectors to the crystal, at least: it is still encrypted there.
- ctz 11y ago
  Yes. Probing at 14nm is immensely challenge but seemingly possible (see, eg, http://dcgsystems.com/products/nanoprobing/nprober-ii/ http://dcgsystems.com/products/nanoprobing/nprober-ii/ which looks terribly expensive!)

81 points by mrb 11y ago

gruez 11y ago

Can someone explain to me why intel is implementing these features? Surely no consumer wants them, so I don't see how it gives them an edge over amd. plus they're leagues ahead of amd already. The only explanation I can think of is that supporters of DRM are somehow subsidizing intel's development efforts.

xenophonf 11y ago
Memory encryption makes cold-boot attacks unfeasible. I doubt someone could decap a processor fast enough in order to mount a cold-boot attack on the keying material stored inside of it. I see this as a natural step in the evolution of Trusted Computing, so Intel's interest in such technology doesn't surprise me.
- m_eiman 11y ago
  It also makes it hard to do things like Thunderstrike or whatever the "read secrets in RAM via DMA from attached devices" issue is called.
SXX 11y ago
Surely no consumer wants them In real life almost everyone use services with DRM and proprietary software some of which contain "secret sauce" that developers want to remain secret. People that use such services and software already voted for technologies like this to be developed.
- xorblurb 11y ago
  99% of them did not even know exactly what they "voted" for...
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > voted for technologies Some may have, but few - even in technical crows - are making fully informed decisions. Often, what is seen as a vote for modern technology is actually resignation* and felling powerless in the face of rapid changes. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-fallacy-how-marketers-are-misrepresenting-american-consumers-and https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-...
htns 11y ago
This would prevent row hammer attacks and detect memory errors in general, so it ought to be of general interest even if it isn't.
- kyled 11y ago
  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this won't protect dram from row hammer attacks. You still can access memory cells and cause other bits to flip. Doesn't matter if the content is encrypted or not.
  - htns 11y ago
    Bit flips will be detected on the next read via MAC failure. Bit flips can still be obnoxious, but they are prevented in the sense the CPU will start a reboot before accepting corrupt memory.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
munin 11y ago
let's say that I want to do some secure banking, so I fire up the secure banking app and off I go. problem: what if my whole operating system is owned, right down to the keyboard interrupt handler? everything I do with this secure banking app is compromised. okay, so instead what if I could put all the keyboard I/O, all the network I/O, the code, and the data, of the secure banking app into a trusted enclave, where the trusted enclave is cryptographically signed and verified from the BIOS up? now the OS can be totally owned but it can't read anything that goes on inside, or comes out of, this little enclave that's doing my banking. that would be cool, right? now what if you could do that for all kinds of apps, like your email, and your web browser, and your key agent, and so on. and they're all in different secure enclaves that can't interfere with each other, and the host operating system can't reach in and touch their memory. wouldn't that be cool?
- teraflop 11y ago
  If I'm understanding this correctly, it doesn't provide any kind of protection against a compromised operating system. How could it? The encryption is transparent to applications, so the OS could just lie and say that encryption is enabled. What it does provide is protection against hardware attacks like memory bus snooping, or chilling and extracting DRAM modules.
  - anonymousDan 11y ago
    Not necessarily, depends on what exactly you put in the enclave. It's possible to design a system where the OS lives outside the enclave in untrusted memory. The assurance that your enclave memory is protected is provided by the hardware, and can be confirmed remotely by an attestation protocol. For more information I would recommend checking out a paper by Microsoft Research called "Shielding applications from an untrusted cloud with Haven" from OSDI' 14.
    - therein 11y ago
      Ring -1?
    - 11y ago
sweis 11y ago
I have seen strong interest in SGX among some large Intel customers.
zvrba 11y ago
Confidential computing in the cloud, for example.
zurn 11y ago
CPU manufacturers have too much chip real estate to know what to do with: The processor cores must be kept physically small to keep them fast. Multicore has predictably hit the software wall at 2-4 cores[1][2]. Caches also have diminishing returns (every doubling of the cache size gets 5-10% perf boost). Intel has been adding features left and right where they can, and apparently the onchip memory controller is still simple enough to add more features to without performance hit. This is helped by memory being glacially slow compared to what happens in the CPU. Biggest slice of Intel's x86 profits come from data centers (and that slice of pie is increasing), a major bottleneck of server workloads moving to "the cloud" is the lack of sound technical means to keep your data safe. [1] Servers can use more cores but they can ditch the onchip GPU. GPU eats 4-8 cores worth of area in latest designs. [2] Even in games, despite performance obsession and heroic optimization efforts, and pressure to squeeze most out of the ~8 cores in consoles: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/05/quadcore-gaming/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/05/quadcore-gaming/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- XorNot 11y ago
  Interesting they haven't been able to conjure a desktop and mobile CPU which supports ECC RAM.
  - witty_username 11y ago
    Most modern AMD processors support ECC. It's purely a artificial limitation as they want businesses to buy more expensive processors from the Xeon line.
- someguydave 11y ago
  > CPU manufacturers have too much chip real estate to know what to do with: Agreed. Ultimately if Intel continues down this 'closed IP' route, their processor monopoly is going to be replaced with generic logic (FPGA-like processors) which will be dynamically programmable.
pdkl95 11y ago
[ assume any use of the word "you" is "you (HN readers in general)" ] Intel and Microsoft et al[1] have been trying to lock down the PC for a long time. This is just the latest version of what used to be known as "Trusted Computing". You may have heard about it in the early/mid 2000s by the name "Palladium"[2]. Why? It's partly a very-misguided approach to "security" (which is often defined as security for the software vendor, not the owner of the machine, aka DRM), and this crosses over into the attempts at extending copyright into some sort of property right trump card[3], but this is really best described as the main battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing. General purpose ("Turing complete") computers are incredibly powerful, and that power scares a lot of people that are used to selling goods with single/fixed purpose (e.g. an "appliance"), and people that are used to being arbiters of a scarce resource (e.g. pre-digital publishing). The best description of this War is probably Cory Doctorow's incredible talk[4] at 28c3. Contrary to Doctorow's optimism that we would win this war, developments like SGX and Intel ME suggest we are actually losing ground rapidly[5]. It's easy to understand the desire to enforce DRM, but the problem is significantly broader, because as John Deere has shown us, these technologies will soon be in "everything". It's one thing to say you are going to jailbreak a phone or work around DRM on a PC. You may be perfectly fine with boycotting MPAA films. You may be fine with installing Linux or BSD in response to the Windows 10 fiasco. However, remember how hard it's getting to buy a TV without the "smart" junk. It's going to be a lot harder avoid these problems when it's your car. Again I suggest watching Doctorow's even more important followup talk, "The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing"[6]. These problems need to be solved now, and we need to start establishing proper legal frameworks to protect user rights, because those rights are rapidly being appropriated. There is a tendency among engineers to avoid political topics and to focus on on technical issues. That is no longer an option, because abstaining from this fight is de facto choosing to let the people trying to hide the General Purpose Computer where nobody can use it. There is no neutral ground when the world is burning[7]. "It taught us that we have to create the future .. or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have care for one another, because if we don't, who will?" - Ivanova (Babylon 5, "Sleeping in Light") [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group (formerly the TCPA) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi... [3] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ (a well-known example) [4] http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg [5] HN doesn't like to hear this - this is easily the fastest way I've seen to earn downvotes - but another big way we are losing the War On General Purpose Computing is the normalization of the "app store". Apple started this with the original iPhone (and later iOS in general), and now an entire generation of programmers think it's just fine that they have to ask a business for permission to publish their software. (jailbreaking doesn't count) [6] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE
mtgx 11y ago
You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Intel is doing this because it's so far ahead of AMD and they have their customers locked-in, so they think they can do whatever they want to their customers' PCs. It's a shame Google actively tried to push Intel chips in Chromebooks over ARM, when ChromeOS is virtually completely architecture agnostic, and that Microsoft killed Windows RT, too. If those things wouldn't have happened we would see Intel more in a panic mode by now, as "high-end" ARM chips start taking over sub-$400 notebooks. Before you say "but Intel's chips are so much more powerful for $400 machines" - not they aren't. Intel has transitioned to using almost completely Atom chips (ARM chips' direct competitors) for sub-$400 machines and the OEMs went along with it, paying them ~3-5x what they would pay for an ARM chip of the same or better performance. All thanks to Intel's monopoly in PCs.
- rwmj 11y ago
  ARM has their own version of this (ARM TrustZone CryptoCell).

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Wow, I did not think Intel would go this far in the general purpose CPU line. There has always been a small set of people with "cost no object" requirements for security (thing 3 letter agencies) but if you get this in a "normal" chip I could imagine it being used for copy protection of many forms, or for enterprise security laptops. I does shut down the "but you can snoop memory anyway with the GPU" loophole.

transpute 11y ago

Note that Intel signs [1] software which runs in SGX enclaves. Windows 10 uses [2][3] SGX. Intel got a pretty long patent on SGX a few years ago. In it, they say that the launch enclave will only issue launch tokens after ensuring that the enclave's author has a business agreement with Intel. The patent also states that they expect enclaves to be useful for DRM, so I'm guessing they want to insert themselves into the entertainment content distribution systems and collect some royalties. [1] https://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/ https://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over... [2] http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows%2010%20Fall%20Update.pdf http://www.alex-ionescu.com/Enclave%20Support%20In%20Windows... [3] https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx-sdk/documentation https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx-sdk/documentation

acqq 11y ago
Thanks. It seems that signifies game over for software cracks and Intel holding the keys. Please insert the text without the leading spaces, it's unreadable on my mobile phone.
- acqq 11y ago
  I really mean both of those. Regarding the second point, the good practice here is starting the quote with a single > or if you quote more than one paragraph, simply inserting the whole quote inside of the " " signs. The spaces in front of the lines are supposed to allow code in the comments, and they introduce scrollable boxes in the text and the text is effectively unreadable on smaller screens as it can't be reformatted to the display cell width.
wsxcde 11y ago
I'm guessing they want to insert themselves into the entertainment content distribution systems and collect some royalties. AFAIK the initial request for SGX came from the paranoid-types at HFT firms who were worried malware would steal their algorithms or something. The signing mechanism is important because SGX is useless unless you have a trusted way of getting your code into the enclave. The only reasonable way out of this is to have a certificate authority and that's what they're doing. If you think there's a different architecture for SGX that provides the same security guarantees, I'd love to hear about it. Intel has much simpler mechanisms than SGX for enforcing DRM. They've been baking a ton of keys into their processors for many generations now; there was a proposal to stick a few keys in there that belonged to entities like netflix and do all the decryption in hardware. If netflix is going to send us encrypted streams, this is probably the best architecture to handle it, because you can setup a high-performance power-efficient hardware streaming pipeline for decryption and decoding.

jrockway 11y ago

This is only for DRM, right? Very few people are getting viruses because someone has come into their house, connected the DRAM bus on their PC to a logic analyzer, and injected malicious code directly into memory. Instead, the malicious code is coming in through trusted code the user is running (web browser, faulty samba server), which encrypted memory does nothing to protect against. I believe ARM has had this in the form of TrustZone for a while.

iofj 11y ago
So I do see a number of advantages : 1) transforms all RAM into ECC RAM 2) consumers may not care, but large server cpu customers certainly will see it as a bonus, some will see it as required. Of course, this won't protect against the NSA. (server cpu customers are the biggest market for intel [1], and also it's the market that's not declining at an alarming rate) [1] http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/moores.law_.chartx519.png http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/m... (if you know a more recent one, do let me know)
- m_eiman 11y ago
  1) transforms all RAM into ECC RAM Not quite; it doesn't correct errors, just detects them.
fatratchet 11y ago
I guess it might help with security of certain thins like full disk encryption. I think there are already devices used by law enforcement or hackers that that can steal disk encyption keys or information just by plugging them into any port with DMA access like firewire or express card. I would assume this could prevent that.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Devices? It's a Github repo: https://github.com/carmaa/inception https://github.com/carmaa/inception
tptacek 11y ago

rwmj 11y ago

Is it possible to decap a processor without damaging it? (ie. so it will continue to work) If you could do that, then you could attempt to probe the unencrypted data or the key.

listic 11y ago
It is, indeed, possible: https://youtu.be/XXs0I5kuoX4?t=2m24s https://youtu.be/XXs0I5kuoX4?t=2m24s Though I don't think it would allow you to probe the unencrypted data or the key. Not at the connectors to the crystal, at least: it is still encrypted there.
ctz 11y ago
Yes. Probing at 14nm is immensely challenge but seemingly possible (see, eg, http://dcgsystems.com/products/nanoprobing/nprober-ii/ http://dcgsystems.com/products/nanoprobing/nprober-ii/ which looks terribly expensive!)