19 ms·

Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

713 points by stargrave 11y ago

odinduty 11y ago
> Secure Boot [...] requires FOSS users to purchase a license from Microsoft Nope.
- ashitlerferad 11y ago
  Requires purchase of a cerficate from one of the authorities Microsoft recognises (Verisign/Digicert/...) and then the signature of Microsoft on compiled bootloader code. Either way, you have to pay and you have to get Microsoft's permission.
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    IFF you want to support the default set of keys installed on computers that ship with Windows. Secure Boot does not prevent you from installing your own keys, in fact most linux distributions do this already and just use a shim loader signed by Microsoft, the rest of the chain is signed by custom keys (the keys are silently and automatically installed for you).
    - vetinari 11y ago
      > IFF you want to support the default set of keys installed on computers Which happens to be a case if you want to use a extension card with its own BIOS. If it is signed, what key is used? Can you resign with your own?
      - snuxoll 11y ago
        You can add your own without wiping the pre-installed ones.
      - drdaeman 11y ago
        IIRC, Secure Boot spec said there must be multiple trust anchors, i.e. it's not like "user's own or Microsoft", but there can be any combination of trusted CAs (and I bet there's NSAKEY somewhere, huh). I'm not sure about the implementations and real-world situation, but as far as I get it, with X.509 with Secure Boot generally uses, one should be able put the exact card's vendor certificate (not MS CA root one) to trust the extension card. (Sadly, I think there's no way to trust one specific signature.) I guess that's probably very non-trivial in practice. At worst, one should be able to put their own CA (to sign their own software) and be forced to add MS CA to trust the third-party software as well. But - if UEFI implementation allows user-defined CAs - it should be possible to run your own code without asking Microsoft's permission.
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    To be fair, I think this is only for tablet & mobile. On desktops and laptops I've seen, there was a way for end-user to upload their own trusted certificates and use those instead of Microsoft ones, and I think that's when done like this (when, whatever the defaults are, end-user can get in control), Secure Boot is a good idea - even though the implementations are not. I guess there must be some ignorant (or malicious) desktop/laptop vendors that don't provide key management options, but hope there isn't many.
  - geofft 11y ago
    It certainly does not require FOSS users to purchase a license. There is already a shim loader signed by a MS-recognized authority, which ships with a signed copy of MokManager, which lets you register a "machine owner key" of your own choosing. You can then use that key to sign kernels for your own machine, or for anyone else who wants to go through the on-screen enrollment step to trust your key. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html No additional money has to change hands between anyone, and no additional permission needs to be granted from Microsoft to anyone. (You have to get the permission of someone with physical access to the machine during boot, but if your goal here was FOSS users controlling their own computing, it's a good thing that that permission is required.)
0xbadf00d 11y ago
There's an related Youtube video from Igor Skochinsky's REcon 2014 talk that I watched this week & found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kCICUPc9_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kCICUPc9_8 May be also be interesting to others wanting further information.
mmastrac 11y ago
Given that chip development has been hitting diminishing returns for a few years it might be time for Open Source to eat the world of processors as well. It feels like the sort of opportune market that server operating systems, databases and web servers occupied: less of a visual aesthetic and more of a better-design-wins market. It's not going to be easy - I'd guess that it would take at least 10 years for a project to get any sort of traction outside of a very small niche group.
- maaku 11y ago
  People are working on that, and it might take less time than you think: http://riscv.org/ http://riscv.org/
  - ashitlerferad 11y ago
    and some of those are working on physical chip production: http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/
  - mmastrac 11y ago
    Yep. But I stick to my guess that it'll take a decade for real change to happen. Obviously the goalposts are a bit fuzzy, but I feel like you have to give the hardware a chance to make it through three generations (assuming three-year lifespan on devices) before someone launches something that is within the ballpark of devices shipping at the same time.
  - revanx_ 11y ago
    maybe some low performance RISCV SoCs will be available in a few years, but at least a decade for workstations socs.
speeder 11y ago
I've been looking into this recently. Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly "binary blobs loaders", having more binary blob than free software code running. There is some good analysis on why even Intel can't fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel ME system rely on a couple of proprietary third party code, that has on contract with Intel explicit prohibitions of Intel ever letting anyone seeing their source, or the keys needed to sign them. Also, Intel ME can't be really trusted, the code is not really "reverse-engineeringable", and it works as a full second OS of sorts, it even has its own JVM running, if someone somehow decide to inject spy software into it, you will never know, also I assume that the first destructive virus to latch into that stuff, will take the world truly by surprise depending on when it triggers (for example if it spreads silently but triggers the destructive payload on a specific date). Also, these features can be abused to abuse the market itself, for example by intentionally making the hardware underperform, and then sell "superior" hardware that has the only difference some software.
- ashitlerferad 11y ago
  People have certainly done ME reverse engineering: http://me.bios.io/ http://me.bios.io/
  - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
    >there is a little man inside your pc... and his thing is bigger than yours. Your wife knows this. I'm supposed to believe this technology is dangerous. But the advocates are children.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      I think you're supposed to be able to distinguish the message from the medium. Certain styles can definitely make that harder, but ultimately if you can't examine an issue by the facts presented, the failure falls on you, as do the consequences. To be clear, I also think the referenced bit is childish and detracts from the message. I just don't think that should affect your belief in whether it's important.
darpa_escapee 11y ago
ARM architectures also suffer from this. You'll be hard pressed to find a board that doesn't require a propriety board support package somewhere in the stack. Ironically, it is usually the bootloader that is/requires a blob or it is the DTB. I remember being in middle school and reading Stallman's articles on the dangers of a TPM-oriented push by manufacturers. As cliche as it is, Stallman was right. The push for platform security is also a push for platform ownership. Tinkering/hacking/your ability as a hardware owner is at ends with corporate security needs and that is a shame.
- ashitlerferad 11y ago
  There are plenty of boards that run using mainline u-boot and mainline Linux, you can often ignore the vendor BSP. You are right about ARM though, TrustZone is another DRM-oriented aspect of ARM-based SoCs.
  - ctz 11y ago
    TrustZone is just another processor mode and associated memory protection, nothing more, nothing less. It's equally as incoherent to say supervisor mode and the MMU is 'DRM-oriented'.
    - ashitlerferad 11y ago
      In practice, TrustZone is for DRM.
  - tremon 11y ago
    While TrustZone can implement DRM, it is not a closed management engine. If you control the board, you can load your own OS there (but, conversely, if you cannot load your own OS there, you do not control the board). There was a talk at FOSDEM this year about using TrustZone to run a small hypervisor: https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/microkernels_genode_usb_armory/ https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/microkernels_genode_u...
  - kabdib 11y ago
ashitlerferad 11y ago
Earlier posts around the same topic: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/10/27/x86_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/10/27/x86_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
I wonder if Apple might do something about this. They don't care so much for the FOSS side of things, obviously, but I wonder if they might demand chips from Intel without the management engine, because it's a potential attack vector they can't control.
- tinco 11y ago
  I suspect at some point they will simply drop Intel for their own (ARM) platform. I think moving will be easy once all app store submissions are in bitcode.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    I strongly believe you are correct. They have been mentioning that their ARM processors are desktop worthy. I also believe Apple are displeased with Intel's current inability to consistently get their new chips to market. All of this has to make one think Apple will take matters into their own hands soon. Likely within the next 2 years.
    - sspiff 11y ago
      Important bit to note here: the two year timeline is probably only feasible for low end devices, like the MacBook and MBA. Towards the higher end, ARM can't hope to field anything in that timeline to compete with even todays i5 or i7s (or corresponding Xeons). Some people do use this kind of CPU power.
      - twoodfin 11y ago
        I don't have a guess at what Apple is actually going to do, but the Retina rollout is a plausible model. Even 5+ years after the first Retina product, it's still not available across the lineup. I don't think the switch would present a significant problem in marketing or for developers, so it would purely be a question of having the chips that fit the products. The Macbook, as you point out, is basically already there.
    - 11y ago
Luker88 11y ago
Check libreboot.org On their FAQ page: https://libreboot.org/faq https://libreboot.org/faq , you can see the question "Why is the latest{Intel,AMD} hw unsupported?" They go into more detail than the provided link. Also, dropped supports starts in 2008 for Intel, 2013 for amd. The truth is: we need something like this to protect the whole boot process. But unless we can put our keys/sw in there, we will never be sure.
- Galanwe 11y ago
  I was at FOSDEM this year (2016) and there was a talk from the leader of LibreBoot. Honestly, his talk on the state of the project was very bitter. He literally said that there is absolutely no hope that LibreBoot will ever be able to cope with ME, and that the fight is over since 2008. As much as I would absolutely love to be able to run a free firmware, unless there is a major change/outsider in the hardware manufacturer world, it seems very unlikely that it will be possible on current x86 architectures.
  - mmebane 11y ago
    I've been using a Raspberry Pi 3 for the past week, and have been pleasantly surprised by the performance. It's no speed demon, to be sure, but it's good enough for all my basic tasks. I wish there were a general "open computing" branch of the Raspberry Pi Foundation that would produce a $50-$100 "pro" version with more RAM and faster bus+peripherals.
    - makomk 11y ago
      The Raspberry Pi still relies on a closed-source blob running on a CPU core whose instruction set isn't publicly documented to even boot, but I suppose at least it's possible to reverse-engineer that unlike Intel ME.
      - Sanddancer 11y ago
        Broadcom released a considerable amount regarding the Videocore IV a couple years ago. Nobody's finished writing an RTOS for it quite yet, but the ISA is now documented. https://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-AG100-R.pdf https://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-...
sievebrain 11y ago
Wait until he finds out about microcode!
- em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
  umm...he already knows about microcode obviously. Libreboot does not allow microcode updates.
mpnordland 11y ago
It's great that these guys pushing POWER8 at least have a workable situation, but at least for me, throwing $3,700 at a motherboard (Alone!) just isn't feasible. I would love to be free of proprietary firmware, but it would seem that's only for people better off than myself.
- chadzawistowski 11y ago
  You have to start with a single step. Costs could go down over time.
  - korethr 11y ago
    While I agree with you, the average buyer of computer components is used to spending an order of magnitude less on a motherboard. A person can go to their usual source of computer parts and pick up a motherboard for a couple hundred USD at the high end. A few thousand USD for motherboard that does not offer an order of magnitude improvement in raw speed or expandability is going to be a very hard sell.
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      The question is rather: Is there a large overlap between the people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars for a free (as freedom) POWER8 workstation and the open source idealists who would love to buy such a free device?
  - mpnordland 11y ago
    You're absolutely right; Most advances do eventually trickle down. But, most advances in FOSS have benefited users who are less well off, making computing, both libre and in general, more available to them. It's frustrating that in order to get a truly free computer one has to pay about the equivalent of 3 months wage, which is a no go for most people I know.
- zanny 11y ago
  Consider the news of the Model 3 this week. There is no reason POWER8 cannot follow a similar trajectory, start with the Roadster equivalent $4k luxury workstation, move down to the performance desktop around $1500, and then release the mass market mobile / integrated board at $300 that can still go head to head with x86.
zmanian 11y ago
Intel ME checks to see if a certain portion of the BIOS flash memory is writable before it allows the main OS to boot. What x86 Chromebooks do is they allow that region to be writeable but then zero that region on every boot. If your ME was backdoored, it was shipped that way from the factory. It's so disappointing that Intel undermined the entire trusted computing stack for some unproven ideas of around ME revenue generating opportunities.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
forty 11y ago
What about VIA x86 CPUs? http://www.viatech.com/en/silicon/processors/ http://www.viatech.com/en/silicon/processors/ Do they implement some "secure boot"-like features?
- PeCaN 11y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, VIA CPUs have no secure boot, management engine, or any other proprietary secondary hardware. Coreboot supports many VIA CPUs and motherboards[1], though it's unclear if it uses any binary blobs the FSF seems alright with VIA Technologies and apparently they're cooperative with open-source BIOS[2]. 1. https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards 2. https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/supportlinuxbios.html https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/supportlinuxbios.html
  - puzzlingcaptcha 11y ago
    VIA CPUs do have a crypto engine called Padlock (with all the usual goodies plus a randomness generator) which is not 'open' so be careful with that. I recall that some independent company was contracted to audit the entropy generator in VIA C7 but I can't find it now.
hackuser 11y ago
1) requires FOSS users to purchase a license from Microsoft to boot FOSS on affected machines that lack an appropriate Secure Boot override. What "appropriate" Secure Boot overrides are available? 2) the end user is unable to modify the signed software without a license from Microsoft, even though they have the source code available to them under the GPL. Other parts of the posting imply that we have no idea what the software does, but thhe statement above says we have the source code. What am I misunderstanding?
- tremon 11y ago
  1a) switch it off (iff the vendor lets you) 1b) nuke the platform signing key and replace it with your own (iff the vendor lets you) 2) You're mixing things up. "We have no idea what the software does" refers to the hardware management code, which can run a full OS stack. But that quote refers to the tivoization "feature" of Secure Boot: you can recompile your software, but not run it on the hardware, because you lack the signing keys to make the machine trust your code. But, see 1)
hackuser 11y ago
This sounds similar to basebands on cellular devices: Subsystems controlled by the vendor, not accessible from the 'user' system, remotely updatable and with access to everything.
- vox_mollis 11y ago
  Except modern baseband processors usually don't have direct access to main memory or peripherals - they are usually linked to the rest of the phone via a serial bus. ME is very, very different - it transparently has access to everything.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > Except modern baseband processors usually don't have direct access to main memory or peripherals - they are usually linked to the rest of the phone via a serial bus. Do you know where I can read more about that? A good, technical, authoritative resource? In my little bit of research, details are sparse and authoritative technical details even more sparse.
    - vox_mollis 11y ago
      Yes, it's tough to find web resources on this. Here is a google books search result: https://books.google.com/books?id=TEa0yDByYmQC&pg=PT232&lpg=PT232&source=bl&ots=AUuEXAvjwL&sig=F8suew3vBzQR--fPh5pmHmSFaGs&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=TEa0yDByYmQC&pg=PT232&lpg=... I'm mostly taking this on good authority from a friend who works in mobile engineering. So, caveat there.
    - 5ilv3r 11y ago
      Paranoid android used to have a nice breakdown on which phones had isolated memory for the baseband and which used shared memory. I cannot find it now, and their site seems to have taken a very wrong turn in the design department.
      - hackuser 11y ago
cwyers 11y ago
Okay, so we get a pile of FUD (Secure Boot and Intel ME are DRM features now? 'kay), no acknowledgement of the actual security threats that compel Intel, AMD, Microsoft and the OEMs to adopt these measures, and an appeal to dump x86 for ARM (um), MIPS (uhhhhhhh), POWER8 (wat), and RISC-V (how?). What is the point of this, exactly?
- kwikiel 11y ago
  Because if there is closed source binary blob in each x86 with privileges level higher than kernel we cannot make secure software (because trust chain will be broken just at processor level)
- 5ilv3r 11y ago
  If a secure boot chain makes you feel nice and fuzzy inside, then perhaps you might be interested in setting up your own. Without the ability to do so, you are boned if the trusted entity becomes untrustworthy (such as if the mfg was to be acquired). If you alone are the trustworthy entity, things work better.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    > If you alone are the trustworthy entity, things work better. That really, really depends on how trustworthy you are, doesn't it? I would argue that most computer users don't and shouldn't trust themselves to secure against low-level threats, and some of the people who do trust themselves really shouldn't.
    - geofft 11y ago
      Yup. I run Debian instead of Gentoo because, for various reasons, I trust the Debian project to be better at things (like triaging, backporting, compiling, and testing security updates promptly and correctly) than I trust myself. I think this is a common decision. I later extended this logic and bought a Chromebook—a decision I don't take lightly, as a free-software advocate, but I was not convinced that there was an alternative that effectively let me retain more control over my computing. One of the things the Chromebook does that basically nobody else does (systemd vaguely wants to do this, my previous employer wanted to do this for our customers, etc., but I don't think anyone actually does) is it enforces a secure-boot-style thing for the entire OS, and makes it hard for anyone who doesn't have the signing key to take control of my computing away with me. In an ideal world, someone other than Google would have the signing key. But per the logic above, I definitely don't want it to be me.
Thoreandan 11y ago
I think that, given a large enough group of people willing to make a mass-purchase of CPUs, Intel would be likely to listen to requests for a batch with an open-sourced Management Engine component, or some shim akin to the one RHEL uses to boot UEFI in Secure-Boot mode. (mentioned it on /r/ReverseEngineering a few months back.) I don't know who to reach out to at Intel on that suggestion though. https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/3pwxjn/rreverseengineerings_weekly_questions_thread/cwdpspb https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/3pwxjn/...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  The possibility I see is their semi-custom business. A cloud provider or someone else with the money can have them make one that strips out all the spyware or DRM stuff. Leaves everything else. Optionally, strips out some other baggage from backward compatibility that FOSS OS's don't even need. Preferably, though, smallest possible changes to the chip like straight up removing the wires connecting ME.
riscy 11y ago
I'd personally like to see the FOSS community try to embrace the POWER architecture: Ubuntu/Canonical are major members of the OpenPOWER foundation [1], so at least an entity sympathetic with our philosophy has an influence on the architecture. [1] http://openpowerfoundation.org http://openpowerfoundation.org
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Red Hat has supported POWER for a long time. Debian does. Even Mint had a PPC release. The big BSD's do. Amiga's are still on PPC haha. I think it's not a question of FOSS support by OS developers. It's the users and app that don't commit to x86 alternatives.
  - makomk 11y ago
    One issue with PPC and POWER is that they're generally big-endian and everything assumes little-endian these days thanks to x86. Even JavaScript is little-endian now.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      That's one of those sad realities of Worse is Better in action. Definitely a disadvantage. Far as why big-endian was The Right Thing, drfuchs had this to say: "Because big-endian matches how most humans have done it for most of history ("five hundred twenty one" is written "521" or "DXXI", not "125" or "IXXD"). Because the left-most bit in a byte is the high-order bit, so the left-most byte in a word should be the high-order byte. Because ordering two 8-character ascii strings can be done with a single 8-byte integer compare instruction (with the obvious generalizations). Because looking for 0x12345678 in a hex dump (visually or with an automatic tool) isn't a maddening task. Because manipulating 1-bit-per-pixel image data and frame buffers (shifting left and right, particularly) doesn't lead to despair. Because that's how any right-thinking person's brain works."
      - wolfgke 11y ago
        It is not obvious whether big or little endian is better. For a nice overview read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-big-endian/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-bi...
zmanian 11y ago
Joanna has proposed a model where we minimize the trust we put in x86 with a peripheral. Seems like a plausible path forward to me. http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...
- dnc 11y ago
  There was an excellent talk related to this that Joanna Rutkowska gave at the 32c3 conference (she talked quite a bit about Intel's ME too, I was completely unaware of its existence up to that point): https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustworthy_x86_laptops https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustwor...
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Unbelievable. Yet again, we have a post on finding x86 alternative that's most FOSS friendly. Yet again, the author is unaware of or ignores the only architecture that's open, has GPL cores, and an ecosystem. That's SPARC. Oracle's T1 and T2 cores are open-source to study. More appropriately, Cobham-Gaisler's Leon3 HW is dual-licensed under GPL and commercial. The Leon4 is 4-cores. SPARC ISA is open. Open Firmware exists. So, why is SPARC left off in all these analyses? It's right there ready to pick up and deploy. More open, easy to acquire, and trustworthy (far as licensing) than than a POWER chip although slower for sure.
- kabdib 11y ago
  Is SPARC unpopular because of its power consumption?
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    There used to be a lot of competition between several types of RISC machine and several x86 vendors. I know about the consolidations on x86 side. I'm not sure why SPARC lost favor versus others, though. I wasn't able to afford RISC workstations back when all that was happening. It would be nice for one of older folks to chime in on what made SPARC unpopular back then.
    - rcarmo 11y ago
      It was the cost/performance ratio, not of the CPU itself, but of the entire thing, including software. Sun sold highly performing, but extremely overpriced hardware that rode in on the hype it built around the architecture but failed to deliver on flexibility and bang for the buck. I was involved in launching an ISP where the whole shebang ran on Sun boxes, and which was over-dimensioned to the point where I once stepped into the data center and found a waist-high box full of E250/E450... Feet. The purple plastic ones you had to remove to rack mount the things. Two years later we'd shrunk down most of the whole thing (except the storage bits, where SPARC still had good performance) to a few racks of Compaq and Dell boxes that were vastly cheaper to maintain (both because they were cheaper, period, and because we didn't need to wrestle with Solaris and the compilers of the time to get stuff working on them). This was back in 1999 or so, and I never saw a SPARC system in production after 2005 (until a few months back when I visited a telco customer who still swears by them for a very specific purpose). I still have one of those plastic feet on my desk at home, as a reminder of the folly of buying single-vendor solutions. It sucks as a paperweight. :)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kabdib 11y ago
Even if the ME was opened, the chips themselves are complex enough that nearly anything could be hidden. State machines that enable backdoors from instruction sequences can be pretty small (triggering these from a preferred vector, such as a web browser, seems hard-ish though).
- yuhong 11y ago
  I dislike how libreboot skips microcode updates.
- oconnore 11y ago
  On the CPU: extract some bits from sequentially allocated memory, a la steganography. When those bits match a certain predicate, run a decryption and feed them into a subroutine. Now release a bunch of png, jpg, and mp4 media on the internet with the low order bits set to match.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  > triggering these from a preferred vector, such as a web browser, seems hard-ish though Easier than it used to be, though, especially given modern Javascript JIT compilers. (And that's to say nothing of more direct methods like Chrome Native Client!)
javajosh 11y ago
Theoretically one way to correct it is to have an external device that blocks network activity going in or out. Yes, I realize you could get around this. The superblob could be a) looking for patterns in JPGs for input, and b) stenographically encoding output into...anything the user is doing. Sigh. Nevermind.
excalibur 11y ago
SHA1
the8472 11y ago
And it's getting worse, SGX[1] allows 3rd party encrypted binary blobs to run on your CPU without being inspectable. It's sold as way to protect your secrets from malware. But it more likely will be used to run DRM code on the user's computer while treating the user as a hostile entity. [1] https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  SGX has the potential to be amazing though. With it you can build "trusted" applications. For example, a Bitcoin mixer that's provably secure. (Well as secure as trusting Intel and users not to be able to break the chip.)
  - the8472 11y ago
    As it is right now you're giving up your liberty (debugging/inspecting/tinkering) in exchange for security. That's generally a bad trade. Sadly one that many people are willing to make until it bites them. It would be a lot better if secure mode had its own supervisor mode that worked through a master key that could be installed at boot time.
    - Kadin 11y ago
      It's really a question of who you trust. There are lots of scenarios where you might trust the developer of a particular piece of software more than you trust the entire software stack running on your PC. This is especially true for a nontechnical / casual / grandma user, who has no hope of ever auditing or even having more than a vague idea of what's running on their computer at a given time, and probably is running (or at least needs to be assumed to be running) six different kinds of malware all the time. To someone like that, the PC itself is a hostile environment which they don't want to share certain information (e.g. their banking details, crypto keys, etc.) with. SGX allows you to ensure that. If you take on premise that the PC is not safe and under your control, but is instead hostile and compromised, basically an outpost of the Internet in your house, then SGX and similar start to make sense. For many people, their computer is always going to be hostile; it was never "theirs" to begin with, so SGX doesn't really cost them anything, and the ability to let a single application basically force its way down to the hardware and elbow everything else in the stack out of the way is an improvement over having to trust the OS, browser, etc. In a way it represents an abject failure on the part of the dominant OS developer (Microsoft) to produce a consumer computing platform that the average user can trust, as well as the failure of most other alternatives (e.g. DoD-style smartcards) to take off in the consumer market.
jMyles 11y ago
Hmm. OK, I have two questions - maybe somebody here has answers: 1) "...these proprietary blobs could easily contain code to exfiltrate encryption keys, remotely activate microphones and cameras..." This seems basically impossible to actually achieve in reality though, because there will still associated network traffic that can be sniffed, and will have been by now, right? I mean, it is plausible that somehow we all just failed to notice that our computers are sending video traffic to the NSA without our noticing it? I can imagine this happening on phones, where the baseband chip is much harder to actually sniff. But through my LAN? I doubt that. 2) Let's imagine that this post is entirely true. Why do Intel and AMD do this? If it's not part of a grand conspiracy, then why? Clearly there are far easier and cheaper ways to achieve what they view as security that don't require such a crippling approach. What's the upside to them?
- salem 11y ago
  It's called covert channels. It could be done by flipping some unused/ignored bits in ip4/tcp headers in a stream of traffic that goes past a collection point.
  - jMyles 11y ago
    But this is still easily visible with wireshark, right? Don't you think we'd have discovered this by now?
    - erikpukinskis 11y ago
      There are ways of doing it invisibly. Change timestamps in very subtle ways, Embed data in lossy media formats, etc. If the code says "phone home if anywhere on the screen you see one of the following email addresses" then it won't show up in a normal security audit, unless you email one of those people during the audit. All the NSA has to do is make the phoning home rare enough that it's probabilisticly unlikely to be observed.
    - teraflop 11y ago
      How would Wireshark reveal this kind of attack? If the management chip has direct hardware access, it can hide data in innocuous-looking packets that the host machine never sees. You would have to monitor both the packets that the OS thinks it's sending, and the packets actually received by the switch, and constantly compare them for mismatches. Given the performance cost, I find it hard to believe that anyone except the most paranoid organizations would actually do this. And of course, if you block the obvious exfiltration methods, all you do is force the attacker to do something more creative. Like modulating inter-packet timings, or even sending data to a nearby radio receiver by using the system bus as an antenna.
conductor 11y ago
This is the main reason that I'm reluctant to upgrade my 5-year-old AMD Phenom II processor. > MIPS is often overlooked. However, China has revived this architecture for general purpose computing with the Loongson core... Baikal-T1 [0] is another interesting MIPS processor that I'd like to play with (or maybe even use). [0] - https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Baikal https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Baikal
ctstover 11y ago
While I would love a contemporary performance computer that can be trusted, no such device is even remotely possible in the manufacturing and fabrication ecosystems of today. Consider for just a moment ALL the chips inside the box. All the microcode, all the ROM, all the places something could be intentionally hidden. The idea that you could buy some parts on the internet at retail price that could satisfy the truly paranoid (ie defense & espionage communities) is ridiculous. On the other hand, it still is probably possible to prevent a computers unrestricted access to the internet. For now at least.
616c 11y ago
The fight is increasingly political, so advocate and donate where you can. We lose when we give up, I suppose. I know what the Libreboot guy said before on his blog, alluded to here, but this is why, as crusty as some might find him, we most generally support Stallman's politics.
- jensen123 11y ago
  I wish the FSF was a bit more nuanced. For example, if DRM causes ordinary computers to come with proprietary code that is impossible to remove, then that is bad indeed. Then you no longer control your own computer. The same computer that you might use for political activities, for example. On the other hand, if entertainment computers, such as blu-ray players or gaming consoles are locked-down and full of DRM, then I don't see a big problem. Sure, the government could potentially ban some movies in the future, and require the manufacturers to update the firmware on your machine so that it will no longer play those movies. But movies and games are expensive to produce, and without DRM most of them probably wouldn't get produced in the first place. In any case, movies and games aren't really that important, compared to say books and articles. The FSF seems to be against DRM EVERYWHERE! They don't seem to realize that DRM might actually be a good thing for some things. Are there any organizations out there that I could donate to, that fight/work for open hardware for general purpose computers, without trying to prevent locked-down entertainment computers?
  - 616c 11y ago
    Disclosure: I became a member days ago, and did not want to mention it. Reading this article made me super proud to have chosen to fork the cash over before reading this crap as it gets worse all the time. At the end of the day, I want a hardliner in this space pushing that line because I know, practically, he cannot win. But if consensus is drawn between him and the other extremes I find distasteful, I want him to pull the resolutions and positions as far left as possible, even if that is slightly left of center. I worry, as current events show, anything less means that counter-forces to the free software movement will wear you down with abject greed by slowly going right of center and taking as much time as it takes to restore the balance back to their proprietary interests after the initial battle has gone to free software advocates. And that is how I see it. Very few of my friends understand the value of highly technical manuals, and that is what open source is about. My brother recently saw my side with automative hacking and experimentation countermeasures on the rise, as reported today on HN. But when I tell non-technical people these manufacturers hide secrets in their faulty designs and let you pay for their ineptitude, even if you want to fix it for yourself on your individual unit without harm or influence on them, they do not get the argument and ask why I think I know better than the compant. They only get the argument when they are locked out of a system they need for their very personal context. Oh well. This is a very personal choice. I love GPL, I love MIT, and I smile when I think how all these hippies made a world for me in the 60s and 70s I could not live without today.
holri 11y ago
There is also an additional possibility: Recycle old computers. A Intel 2008 laptop performs OK with a modern GNU/Linux with an efficient Desktop (for example XFCE4). This also helps avoiding CO2 emissions, saves rare earths and energy. And it is a statement against a unsustainable throwaway society.
- krylon 11y ago
  The problem with such old devices is that some of them can be impressively reliable, at an age of ~8 years, one has to worry about the device starting to fail. If you want to keep the device going once something breaks, getting replacement parts can become interesting. Not impossible per se, but depending on how popular a particular device was in its day, finding spare parts can be very time-consuming. Still, I agree. I have a 2008 netbook at home I still use regularly, and I hardly throw away a computer that still basically works.
rdtsc 11y ago
> POWER is the only architecture currently competitive with Intel in terms of raw performance, and boots using a fully FOSS firmware with no DRM antifeatures embedded. That's pretty cool. This combined with some benchmarks I saw for server workload on POWER8 will hopefully revive some interest in the platform.
lasermike026 11y ago
Dependence on a few companies to design and make processors will not work in the long term. Open source processor design that can be manufactured by anyone is the way out of this problem. Even if this never happens the attempt to go there is enough to make the large companies involved with cpus beg and serve.
profeta 11y ago
They tested the waters with GPUs. after nobody complained at all, they just moved to CPUs.
rcarmo 11y ago
When I saw RISCV mentioned as an alternative, I had to check the date twice to make sure it wasn't an April Fools'. I understand the concerns and all, but wish the alternatives were a little better picked out. Most people already mentioned SPARC and ARM as alternatives, so I won't delve into those arguments other than point out that there will _always_ be commercial interests at stake here - hardware, unlike software, requires considerable material resources to create* and distribute (and is still harder - and therefore rarer - to create for its own sake), so there won't be a wide variety of viable options out there, and new CPU architectures don't grow on trees. Better to lobby for open specs on the "offending" bits of hardware, really. * - yes, software creation can also require material resources (and a whole lot of time, which can be expensive). Let's not belabor that point...
Animats 11y ago
The way to blow this wide open is to catch Intel's "management engine" doing something really bad and publicize it. It could do for Intel what John German did for Volkswagen AG.[1] One approach would be to build some honeypots likely to attract attention. Give them a job that's not too traffic intensive but is suspicious, such as encrypted IRC. Record all traffic in and out of the box using external hardware. Get them fake encrypted traffic from suspicious sources (Tor, strange sites in suspicious countries, etc.) Wait for strange packets to show up that are not meaningful to the host software but cause something to happen on the target. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34519184 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34519184
cdkersey 11y ago
It seems superficial to concentrate on a few kilobytes of binary blobs as a security issue when millions of logic gates are also hidden from user scrutiny by design in most computers. That the number of people you have to trust now includes firmware developers in addition to hardware designers is a small movement in the scheme of things, though it may be a movement in an undesirable direction.
daveheq 11y ago
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.
daveheq 11y ago
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.
zvrba 11y ago
This is a one-sided view. It can, and also is, used to implement theft-protection, thanks to which the police tracked the guy, he got convicted and I got my expensive laptop back. Yes, the guy reinstalled the OS, but the tracking SW survived precisely thanks to these technologies.
- brokenmachine 11y ago
  Can you give more details on what OS and tracking SW you were using?
  - zvrba 11y ago
    Absolute LoJack, with windows. It installs itself as a windows driver before/during the boot. It sends location once a day, or more often if you flag the device as stolen/missing. It can also remotely "brick" the device (yes, it can be undone by the owner) if the data is of concern. I deliberately did not set BIOS password so that the laptop remained usable to whomever got their hands on it.
lazyjones 11y ago
Opterons from 2011-2012 are still available and seem to be the best option to me for this purpose. They're reasonably performant (16 cores...), affordable and there are plenty of mainboard options. Software support is excellent of course. I'm just not sure how valid the "pre-2013 AMD is safe" claim is, since vendors have been known to include some remote management technology like Intel's ME in earlier versions before making it a standard feature.

713 points by stargrave 11y ago

odinduty 11y ago

> Secure Boot [...] requires FOSS users to purchase a license from Microsoft Nope.

ashitlerferad 11y ago
Requires purchase of a cerficate from one of the authorities Microsoft recognises (Verisign/Digicert/...) and then the signature of Microsoft on compiled bootloader code. Either way, you have to pay and you have to get Microsoft's permission.
- snuxoll 11y ago
  IFF you want to support the default set of keys installed on computers that ship with Windows. Secure Boot does not prevent you from installing your own keys, in fact most linux distributions do this already and just use a shim loader signed by Microsoft, the rest of the chain is signed by custom keys (the keys are silently and automatically installed for you).
  - vetinari 11y ago
    > IFF you want to support the default set of keys installed on computers Which happens to be a case if you want to use a extension card with its own BIOS. If it is signed, what key is used? Can you resign with your own?
    - snuxoll 11y ago
      You can add your own without wiping the pre-installed ones.
    - drdaeman 11y ago
      IIRC, Secure Boot spec said there must be multiple trust anchors, i.e. it's not like "user's own or Microsoft", but there can be any combination of trusted CAs (and I bet there's NSAKEY somewhere, huh). I'm not sure about the implementations and real-world situation, but as far as I get it, with X.509 with Secure Boot generally uses, one should be able put the exact card's vendor certificate (not MS CA root one) to trust the extension card. (Sadly, I think there's no way to trust one specific signature.) I guess that's probably very non-trivial in practice. At worst, one should be able to put their own CA (to sign their own software) and be forced to add MS CA to trust the third-party software as well. But - if UEFI implementation allows user-defined CAs - it should be possible to run your own code without asking Microsoft's permission.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  To be fair, I think this is only for tablet & mobile. On desktops and laptops I've seen, there was a way for end-user to upload their own trusted certificates and use those instead of Microsoft ones, and I think that's when done like this (when, whatever the defaults are, end-user can get in control), Secure Boot is a good idea - even though the implementations are not. I guess there must be some ignorant (or malicious) desktop/laptop vendors that don't provide key management options, but hope there isn't many.
- geofft 11y ago
  It certainly does not require FOSS users to purchase a license. There is already a shim loader signed by a MS-recognized authority, which ships with a signed copy of MokManager, which lets you register a "machine owner key" of your own choosing. You can then use that key to sign kernels for your own machine, or for anyone else who wants to go through the on-screen enrollment step to trust your key. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html No additional money has to change hands between anyone, and no additional permission needs to be granted from Microsoft to anyone. (You have to get the permission of someone with physical access to the machine during boot, but if your goal here was FOSS users controlling their own computing, it's a good thing that that permission is required.)

0xbadf00d 11y ago

There's an related Youtube video from Igor Skochinsky's REcon 2014 talk that I watched this week & found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kCICUPc9_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kCICUPc9_8 May be also be interesting to others wanting further information.

mmastrac 11y ago

Given that chip development has been hitting diminishing returns for a few years it might be time for Open Source to eat the world of processors as well. It feels like the sort of opportune market that server operating systems, databases and web servers occupied: less of a visual aesthetic and more of a better-design-wins market. It's not going to be easy - I'd guess that it would take at least 10 years for a project to get any sort of traction outside of a very small niche group.

maaku 11y ago
People are working on that, and it might take less time than you think: http://riscv.org/ http://riscv.org/
- ashitlerferad 11y ago
  and some of those are working on physical chip production: http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/
- mmastrac 11y ago
  Yep. But I stick to my guess that it'll take a decade for real change to happen. Obviously the goalposts are a bit fuzzy, but I feel like you have to give the hardware a chance to make it through three generations (assuming three-year lifespan on devices) before someone launches something that is within the ballpark of devices shipping at the same time.
- revanx_ 11y ago
  maybe some low performance RISCV SoCs will be available in a few years, but at least a decade for workstations socs.

speeder 11y ago

I've been looking into this recently. Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly "binary blobs loaders", having more binary blob than free software code running. There is some good analysis on why even Intel can't fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel ME system rely on a couple of proprietary third party code, that has on contract with Intel explicit prohibitions of Intel ever letting anyone seeing their source, or the keys needed to sign them. Also, Intel ME can't be really trusted, the code is not really "reverse-engineeringable", and it works as a full second OS of sorts, it even has its own JVM running, if someone somehow decide to inject spy software into it, you will never know, also I assume that the first destructive virus to latch into that stuff, will take the world truly by surprise depending on when it triggers (for example if it spreads silently but triggers the destructive payload on a specific date). Also, these features can be abused to abuse the market itself, for example by intentionally making the hardware underperform, and then sell "superior" hardware that has the only difference some software.

ashitlerferad 11y ago
People have certainly done ME reverse engineering: http://me.bios.io/ http://me.bios.io/
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  >there is a little man inside your pc... and his thing is bigger than yours. Your wife knows this. I'm supposed to believe this technology is dangerous. But the advocates are children.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I think you're supposed to be able to distinguish the message from the medium. Certain styles can definitely make that harder, but ultimately if you can't examine an issue by the facts presented, the failure falls on you, as do the consequences. To be clear, I also think the referenced bit is childish and detracts from the message. I just don't think that should affect your belief in whether it's important.

darpa_escapee 11y ago

ARM architectures also suffer from this. You'll be hard pressed to find a board that doesn't require a propriety board support package somewhere in the stack. Ironically, it is usually the bootloader that is/requires a blob or it is the DTB. I remember being in middle school and reading Stallman's articles on the dangers of a TPM-oriented push by manufacturers. As cliche as it is, Stallman was right. The push for platform security is also a push for platform ownership. Tinkering/hacking/your ability as a hardware owner is at ends with corporate security needs and that is a shame.

ashitlerferad 11y ago
There are plenty of boards that run using mainline u-boot and mainline Linux, you can often ignore the vendor BSP. You are right about ARM though, TrustZone is another DRM-oriented aspect of ARM-based SoCs.
- ctz 11y ago
  TrustZone is just another processor mode and associated memory protection, nothing more, nothing less. It's equally as incoherent to say supervisor mode and the MMU is 'DRM-oriented'.
  - ashitlerferad 11y ago
    In practice, TrustZone is for DRM.
- tremon 11y ago
  While TrustZone can implement DRM, it is not a closed management engine. If you control the board, you can load your own OS there (but, conversely, if you cannot load your own OS there, you do not control the board). There was a talk at FOSDEM this year about using TrustZone to run a small hypervisor: https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/microkernels_genode_usb_armory/ https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/microkernels_genode_u...
- kabdib 11y ago

ashitlerferad 11y ago

Earlier posts around the same topic: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/10/27/x86_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/10/27/x86_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

I wonder if Apple might do something about this. They don't care so much for the FOSS side of things, obviously, but I wonder if they might demand chips from Intel without the management engine, because it's a potential attack vector they can't control.

tinco 11y ago
I suspect at some point they will simply drop Intel for their own (ARM) platform. I think moving will be easy once all app store submissions are in bitcode.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I strongly believe you are correct. They have been mentioning that their ARM processors are desktop worthy. I also believe Apple are displeased with Intel's current inability to consistently get their new chips to market. All of this has to make one think Apple will take matters into their own hands soon. Likely within the next 2 years.
  - sspiff 11y ago
    Important bit to note here: the two year timeline is probably only feasible for low end devices, like the MacBook and MBA. Towards the higher end, ARM can't hope to field anything in that timeline to compete with even todays i5 or i7s (or corresponding Xeons). Some people do use this kind of CPU power.
    - twoodfin 11y ago
      I don't have a guess at what Apple is actually going to do, but the Retina rollout is a plausible model. Even 5+ years after the first Retina product, it's still not available across the lineup. I don't think the switch would present a significant problem in marketing or for developers, so it would purely be a question of having the chips that fit the products. The Macbook, as you point out, is basically already there.
  - 11y ago

Luker88 11y ago

Check libreboot.org On their FAQ page: https://libreboot.org/faq https://libreboot.org/faq , you can see the question "Why is the latest{Intel,AMD} hw unsupported?" They go into more detail than the provided link. Also, dropped supports starts in 2008 for Intel, 2013 for amd. The truth is: we need something like this to protect the whole boot process. But unless we can put our keys/sw in there, we will never be sure.

Galanwe 11y ago
I was at FOSDEM this year (2016) and there was a talk from the leader of LibreBoot. Honestly, his talk on the state of the project was very bitter. He literally said that there is absolutely no hope that LibreBoot will ever be able to cope with ME, and that the fight is over since 2008. As much as I would absolutely love to be able to run a free firmware, unless there is a major change/outsider in the hardware manufacturer world, it seems very unlikely that it will be possible on current x86 architectures.
- mmebane 11y ago
  I've been using a Raspberry Pi 3 for the past week, and have been pleasantly surprised by the performance. It's no speed demon, to be sure, but it's good enough for all my basic tasks. I wish there were a general "open computing" branch of the Raspberry Pi Foundation that would produce a $50-$100 "pro" version with more RAM and faster bus+peripherals.
  - makomk 11y ago
    The Raspberry Pi still relies on a closed-source blob running on a CPU core whose instruction set isn't publicly documented to even boot, but I suppose at least it's possible to reverse-engineer that unlike Intel ME.
    - Sanddancer 11y ago
      Broadcom released a considerable amount regarding the Videocore IV a couple years ago. Nobody's finished writing an RTOS for it quite yet, but the ISA is now documented. https://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-AG100-R.pdf https://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-...

sievebrain 11y ago

Wait until he finds out about microcode!

em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
umm...he already knows about microcode obviously. Libreboot does not allow microcode updates.

mpnordland 11y ago

It's great that these guys pushing POWER8 at least have a workable situation, but at least for me, throwing $3,700 at a motherboard (Alone!) just isn't feasible. I would love to be free of proprietary firmware, but it would seem that's only for people better off than myself.

chadzawistowski 11y ago
You have to start with a single step. Costs could go down over time.
- korethr 11y ago
  While I agree with you, the average buyer of computer components is used to spending an order of magnitude less on a motherboard. A person can go to their usual source of computer parts and pick up a motherboard for a couple hundred USD at the high end. A few thousand USD for motherboard that does not offer an order of magnitude improvement in raw speed or expandability is going to be a very hard sell.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    The question is rather: Is there a large overlap between the people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars for a free (as freedom) POWER8 workstation and the open source idealists who would love to buy such a free device?
- mpnordland 11y ago
  You're absolutely right; Most advances do eventually trickle down. But, most advances in FOSS have benefited users who are less well off, making computing, both libre and in general, more available to them. It's frustrating that in order to get a truly free computer one has to pay about the equivalent of 3 months wage, which is a no go for most people I know.
zanny 11y ago
Consider the news of the Model 3 this week. There is no reason POWER8 cannot follow a similar trajectory, start with the Roadster equivalent $4k luxury workstation, move down to the performance desktop around $1500, and then release the mass market mobile / integrated board at $300 that can still go head to head with x86.

zmanian 11y ago

Intel ME checks to see if a certain portion of the BIOS flash memory is writable before it allows the main OS to boot. What x86 Chromebooks do is they allow that region to be writeable but then zero that region on every boot. If your ME was backdoored, it was shipped that way from the factory. It's so disappointing that Intel undermined the entire trusted computing stack for some unproven ideas of around ME revenue generating opportunities.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

forty 11y ago

What about VIA x86 CPUs? http://www.viatech.com/en/silicon/processors/ http://www.viatech.com/en/silicon/processors/ Do they implement some "secure boot"-like features?

PeCaN 11y ago
To the best of my knowledge, VIA CPUs have no secure boot, management engine, or any other proprietary secondary hardware. Coreboot supports many VIA CPUs and motherboards[1], though it's unclear if it uses any binary blobs the FSF seems alright with VIA Technologies and apparently they're cooperative with open-source BIOS[2]. 1. https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards 2. https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/supportlinuxbios.html https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/supportlinuxbios.html
- puzzlingcaptcha 11y ago
  VIA CPUs do have a crypto engine called Padlock (with all the usual goodies plus a randomness generator) which is not 'open' so be careful with that. I recall that some independent company was contracted to audit the entropy generator in VIA C7 but I can't find it now.

hackuser 11y ago

1) requires FOSS users to purchase a license from Microsoft to boot FOSS on affected machines that lack an appropriate Secure Boot override. What "appropriate" Secure Boot overrides are available? 2) the end user is unable to modify the signed software without a license from Microsoft, even though they have the source code available to them under the GPL. Other parts of the posting imply that we have no idea what the software does, but thhe statement above says we have the source code. What am I misunderstanding?

tremon 11y ago
1a) switch it off (iff the vendor lets you) 1b) nuke the platform signing key and replace it with your own (iff the vendor lets you) 2) You're mixing things up. "We have no idea what the software does" refers to the hardware management code, which can run a full OS stack. But that quote refers to the tivoization "feature" of Secure Boot: you can recompile your software, but not run it on the hardware, because you lack the signing keys to make the machine trust your code. But, see 1)

hackuser 11y ago

This sounds similar to basebands on cellular devices: Subsystems controlled by the vendor, not accessible from the 'user' system, remotely updatable and with access to everything.

vox_mollis 11y ago
Except modern baseband processors usually don't have direct access to main memory or peripherals - they are usually linked to the rest of the phone via a serial bus. ME is very, very different - it transparently has access to everything.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Except modern baseband processors usually don't have direct access to main memory or peripherals - they are usually linked to the rest of the phone via a serial bus. Do you know where I can read more about that? A good, technical, authoritative resource? In my little bit of research, details are sparse and authoritative technical details even more sparse.
  - vox_mollis 11y ago
    Yes, it's tough to find web resources on this. Here is a google books search result: https://books.google.com/books?id=TEa0yDByYmQC&pg=PT232&lpg=PT232&source=bl&ots=AUuEXAvjwL&sig=F8suew3vBzQR--fPh5pmHmSFaGs&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=TEa0yDByYmQC&pg=PT232&lpg=... I'm mostly taking this on good authority from a friend who works in mobile engineering. So, caveat there.
  - 5ilv3r 11y ago
    Paranoid android used to have a nice breakdown on which phones had isolated memory for the baseband and which used shared memory. I cannot find it now, and their site seems to have taken a very wrong turn in the design department.
    - hackuser 11y ago

cwyers 11y ago

Okay, so we get a pile of FUD (Secure Boot and Intel ME are DRM features now? 'kay), no acknowledgement of the actual security threats that compel Intel, AMD, Microsoft and the OEMs to adopt these measures, and an appeal to dump x86 for ARM (um), MIPS (uhhhhhhh), POWER8 (wat), and RISC-V (how?). What is the point of this, exactly?

kwikiel 11y ago
Because if there is closed source binary blob in each x86 with privileges level higher than kernel we cannot make secure software (because trust chain will be broken just at processor level)
5ilv3r 11y ago
If a secure boot chain makes you feel nice and fuzzy inside, then perhaps you might be interested in setting up your own. Without the ability to do so, you are boned if the trusted entity becomes untrustworthy (such as if the mfg was to be acquired). If you alone are the trustworthy entity, things work better.
- cwyers 11y ago
  > If you alone are the trustworthy entity, things work better. That really, really depends on how trustworthy you are, doesn't it? I would argue that most computer users don't and shouldn't trust themselves to secure against low-level threats, and some of the people who do trust themselves really shouldn't.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Yup. I run Debian instead of Gentoo because, for various reasons, I trust the Debian project to be better at things (like triaging, backporting, compiling, and testing security updates promptly and correctly) than I trust myself. I think this is a common decision. I later extended this logic and bought a Chromebook—a decision I don't take lightly, as a free-software advocate, but I was not convinced that there was an alternative that effectively let me retain more control over my computing. One of the things the Chromebook does that basically nobody else does (systemd vaguely wants to do this, my previous employer wanted to do this for our customers, etc., but I don't think anyone actually does) is it enforces a secure-boot-style thing for the entire OS, and makes it hard for anyone who doesn't have the signing key to take control of my computing away with me. In an ideal world, someone other than Google would have the signing key. But per the logic above, I definitely don't want it to be me.

Thoreandan 11y ago

I think that, given a large enough group of people willing to make a mass-purchase of CPUs, Intel would be likely to listen to requests for a batch with an open-sourced Management Engine component, or some shim akin to the one RHEL uses to boot UEFI in Secure-Boot mode. (mentioned it on /r/ReverseEngineering a few months back.) I don't know who to reach out to at Intel on that suggestion though. https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/3pwxjn/rreverseengineerings_weekly_questions_thread/cwdpspb https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/3pwxjn/...

nickpsecurity 11y ago
The possibility I see is their semi-custom business. A cloud provider or someone else with the money can have them make one that strips out all the spyware or DRM stuff. Leaves everything else. Optionally, strips out some other baggage from backward compatibility that FOSS OS's don't even need. Preferably, though, smallest possible changes to the chip like straight up removing the wires connecting ME.

riscy 11y ago

I'd personally like to see the FOSS community try to embrace the POWER architecture: Ubuntu/Canonical are major members of the OpenPOWER foundation [1], so at least an entity sympathetic with our philosophy has an influence on the architecture. [1] http://openpowerfoundation.org http://openpowerfoundation.org

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Red Hat has supported POWER for a long time. Debian does. Even Mint had a PPC release. The big BSD's do. Amiga's are still on PPC haha. I think it's not a question of FOSS support by OS developers. It's the users and app that don't commit to x86 alternatives.
- makomk 11y ago
  One issue with PPC and POWER is that they're generally big-endian and everything assumes little-endian these days thanks to x86. Even JavaScript is little-endian now.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    That's one of those sad realities of Worse is Better in action. Definitely a disadvantage. Far as why big-endian was The Right Thing, drfuchs had this to say: "Because big-endian matches how most humans have done it for most of history ("five hundred twenty one" is written "521" or "DXXI", not "125" or "IXXD"). Because the left-most bit in a byte is the high-order bit, so the left-most byte in a word should be the high-order byte. Because ordering two 8-character ascii strings can be done with a single 8-byte integer compare instruction (with the obvious generalizations). Because looking for 0x12345678 in a hex dump (visually or with an automatic tool) isn't a maddening task. Because manipulating 1-bit-per-pixel image data and frame buffers (shifting left and right, particularly) doesn't lead to despair. Because that's how any right-thinking person's brain works."
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      It is not obvious whether big or little endian is better. For a nice overview read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-big-endian/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-bi...

zmanian 11y ago

Joanna has proposed a model where we minimize the trust we put in x86 with a peripheral. Seems like a plausible path forward to me. http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...

dnc 11y ago
There was an excellent talk related to this that Joanna Rutkowska gave at the 32c3 conference (she talked quite a bit about Intel's ME too, I was completely unaware of its existence up to that point): https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustworthy_x86_laptops https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustwor...

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Unbelievable. Yet again, we have a post on finding x86 alternative that's most FOSS friendly. Yet again, the author is unaware of or ignores the only architecture that's open, has GPL cores, and an ecosystem. That's SPARC. Oracle's T1 and T2 cores are open-source to study. More appropriately, Cobham-Gaisler's Leon3 HW is dual-licensed under GPL and commercial. The Leon4 is 4-cores. SPARC ISA is open. Open Firmware exists. So, why is SPARC left off in all these analyses? It's right there ready to pick up and deploy. More open, easy to acquire, and trustworthy (far as licensing) than than a POWER chip although slower for sure.

kabdib 11y ago
Is SPARC unpopular because of its power consumption?
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  There used to be a lot of competition between several types of RISC machine and several x86 vendors. I know about the consolidations on x86 side. I'm not sure why SPARC lost favor versus others, though. I wasn't able to afford RISC workstations back when all that was happening. It would be nice for one of older folks to chime in on what made SPARC unpopular back then.
  - rcarmo 11y ago
    It was the cost/performance ratio, not of the CPU itself, but of the entire thing, including software. Sun sold highly performing, but extremely overpriced hardware that rode in on the hype it built around the architecture but failed to deliver on flexibility and bang for the buck. I was involved in launching an ISP where the whole shebang ran on Sun boxes, and which was over-dimensioned to the point where I once stepped into the data center and found a waist-high box full of E250/E450... Feet. The purple plastic ones you had to remove to rack mount the things. Two years later we'd shrunk down most of the whole thing (except the storage bits, where SPARC still had good performance) to a few racks of Compaq and Dell boxes that were vastly cheaper to maintain (both because they were cheaper, period, and because we didn't need to wrestle with Solaris and the compilers of the time to get stuff working on them). This was back in 1999 or so, and I never saw a SPARC system in production after 2005 (until a few months back when I visited a telco customer who still swears by them for a very specific purpose). I still have one of those plastic feet on my desk at home, as a reminder of the folly of buying single-vendor solutions. It sucks as a paperweight. :)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

kabdib 11y ago

Even if the ME was opened, the chips themselves are complex enough that nearly anything could be hidden. State machines that enable backdoors from instruction sequences can be pretty small (triggering these from a preferred vector, such as a web browser, seems hard-ish though).

yuhong 11y ago
I dislike how libreboot skips microcode updates.
oconnore 11y ago
On the CPU: extract some bits from sequentially allocated memory, a la steganography. When those bits match a certain predicate, run a decryption and feed them into a subroutine. Now release a bunch of png, jpg, and mp4 media on the internet with the low order bits set to match.
duskwuff 11y ago
> triggering these from a preferred vector, such as a web browser, seems hard-ish though Easier than it used to be, though, especially given modern Javascript JIT compilers. (And that's to say nothing of more direct methods like Chrome Native Client!)

javajosh 11y ago

Theoretically one way to correct it is to have an external device that blocks network activity going in or out. Yes, I realize you could get around this. The superblob could be a) looking for patterns in JPGs for input, and b) stenographically encoding output into...anything the user is doing. Sigh. Nevermind.

excalibur 11y ago

SHA1

the8472 11y ago

And it's getting worse, SGX[1] allows 3rd party encrypted binary blobs to run on your CPU without being inspectable. It's sold as way to protect your secrets from malware. But it more likely will be used to run DRM code on the user's computer while treating the user as a hostile entity. [1] https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx

MichaelGG 11y ago
SGX has the potential to be amazing though. With it you can build "trusted" applications. For example, a Bitcoin mixer that's provably secure. (Well as secure as trusting Intel and users not to be able to break the chip.)
- the8472 11y ago
  As it is right now you're giving up your liberty (debugging/inspecting/tinkering) in exchange for security. That's generally a bad trade. Sadly one that many people are willing to make until it bites them. It would be a lot better if secure mode had its own supervisor mode that worked through a master key that could be installed at boot time.
  - Kadin 11y ago
    It's really a question of who you trust. There are lots of scenarios where you might trust the developer of a particular piece of software more than you trust the entire software stack running on your PC. This is especially true for a nontechnical / casual / grandma user, who has no hope of ever auditing or even having more than a vague idea of what's running on their computer at a given time, and probably is running (or at least needs to be assumed to be running) six different kinds of malware all the time. To someone like that, the PC itself is a hostile environment which they don't want to share certain information (e.g. their banking details, crypto keys, etc.) with. SGX allows you to ensure that. If you take on premise that the PC is not safe and under your control, but is instead hostile and compromised, basically an outpost of the Internet in your house, then SGX and similar start to make sense. For many people, their computer is always going to be hostile; it was never "theirs" to begin with, so SGX doesn't really cost them anything, and the ability to let a single application basically force its way down to the hardware and elbow everything else in the stack out of the way is an improvement over having to trust the OS, browser, etc. In a way it represents an abject failure on the part of the dominant OS developer (Microsoft) to produce a consumer computing platform that the average user can trust, as well as the failure of most other alternatives (e.g. DoD-style smartcards) to take off in the consumer market.

jMyles 11y ago

Hmm. OK, I have two questions - maybe somebody here has answers: 1) "...these proprietary blobs could easily contain code to exfiltrate encryption keys, remotely activate microphones and cameras..." This seems basically impossible to actually achieve in reality though, because there will still associated network traffic that can be sniffed, and will have been by now, right? I mean, it is plausible that somehow we all just failed to notice that our computers are sending video traffic to the NSA without our noticing it? I can imagine this happening on phones, where the baseband chip is much harder to actually sniff. But through my LAN? I doubt that. 2) Let's imagine that this post is entirely true. Why do Intel and AMD do this? If it's not part of a grand conspiracy, then why? Clearly there are far easier and cheaper ways to achieve what they view as security that don't require such a crippling approach. What's the upside to them?

salem 11y ago
It's called covert channels. It could be done by flipping some unused/ignored bits in ip4/tcp headers in a stream of traffic that goes past a collection point.
- jMyles 11y ago
  But this is still easily visible with wireshark, right? Don't you think we'd have discovered this by now?
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    There are ways of doing it invisibly. Change timestamps in very subtle ways, Embed data in lossy media formats, etc. If the code says "phone home if anywhere on the screen you see one of the following email addresses" then it won't show up in a normal security audit, unless you email one of those people during the audit. All the NSA has to do is make the phoning home rare enough that it's probabilisticly unlikely to be observed.
  - teraflop 11y ago
    How would Wireshark reveal this kind of attack? If the management chip has direct hardware access, it can hide data in innocuous-looking packets that the host machine never sees. You would have to monitor both the packets that the OS thinks it's sending, and the packets actually received by the switch, and constantly compare them for mismatches. Given the performance cost, I find it hard to believe that anyone except the most paranoid organizations would actually do this. And of course, if you block the obvious exfiltration methods, all you do is force the attacker to do something more creative. Like modulating inter-packet timings, or even sending data to a nearby radio receiver by using the system bus as an antenna.

conductor 11y ago

This is the main reason that I'm reluctant to upgrade my 5-year-old AMD Phenom II processor. > MIPS is often overlooked. However, China has revived this architecture for general purpose computing with the Loongson core... Baikal-T1 [0] is another interesting MIPS processor that I'd like to play with (or maybe even use). [0] - https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Baikal https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Baikal

ctstover 11y ago

While I would love a contemporary performance computer that can be trusted, no such device is even remotely possible in the manufacturing and fabrication ecosystems of today. Consider for just a moment ALL the chips inside the box. All the microcode, all the ROM, all the places something could be intentionally hidden. The idea that you could buy some parts on the internet at retail price that could satisfy the truly paranoid (ie defense & espionage communities) is ridiculous. On the other hand, it still is probably possible to prevent a computers unrestricted access to the internet. For now at least.

616c 11y ago

The fight is increasingly political, so advocate and donate where you can. We lose when we give up, I suppose. I know what the Libreboot guy said before on his blog, alluded to here, but this is why, as crusty as some might find him, we most generally support Stallman's politics.

jensen123 11y ago
I wish the FSF was a bit more nuanced. For example, if DRM causes ordinary computers to come with proprietary code that is impossible to remove, then that is bad indeed. Then you no longer control your own computer. The same computer that you might use for political activities, for example. On the other hand, if entertainment computers, such as blu-ray players or gaming consoles are locked-down and full of DRM, then I don't see a big problem. Sure, the government could potentially ban some movies in the future, and require the manufacturers to update the firmware on your machine so that it will no longer play those movies. But movies and games are expensive to produce, and without DRM most of them probably wouldn't get produced in the first place. In any case, movies and games aren't really that important, compared to say books and articles. The FSF seems to be against DRM EVERYWHERE! They don't seem to realize that DRM might actually be a good thing for some things. Are there any organizations out there that I could donate to, that fight/work for open hardware for general purpose computers, without trying to prevent locked-down entertainment computers?
- 616c 11y ago
  Disclosure: I became a member days ago, and did not want to mention it. Reading this article made me super proud to have chosen to fork the cash over before reading this crap as it gets worse all the time. At the end of the day, I want a hardliner in this space pushing that line because I know, practically, he cannot win. But if consensus is drawn between him and the other extremes I find distasteful, I want him to pull the resolutions and positions as far left as possible, even if that is slightly left of center. I worry, as current events show, anything less means that counter-forces to the free software movement will wear you down with abject greed by slowly going right of center and taking as much time as it takes to restore the balance back to their proprietary interests after the initial battle has gone to free software advocates. And that is how I see it. Very few of my friends understand the value of highly technical manuals, and that is what open source is about. My brother recently saw my side with automative hacking and experimentation countermeasures on the rise, as reported today on HN. But when I tell non-technical people these manufacturers hide secrets in their faulty designs and let you pay for their ineptitude, even if you want to fix it for yourself on your individual unit without harm or influence on them, they do not get the argument and ask why I think I know better than the compant. They only get the argument when they are locked out of a system they need for their very personal context. Oh well. This is a very personal choice. I love GPL, I love MIT, and I smile when I think how all these hippies made a world for me in the 60s and 70s I could not live without today.

holri 11y ago

There is also an additional possibility: Recycle old computers. A Intel 2008 laptop performs OK with a modern GNU/Linux with an efficient Desktop (for example XFCE4). This also helps avoiding CO2 emissions, saves rare earths and energy. And it is a statement against a unsustainable throwaway society.

krylon 11y ago
The problem with such old devices is that some of them can be impressively reliable, at an age of ~8 years, one has to worry about the device starting to fail. If you want to keep the device going once something breaks, getting replacement parts can become interesting. Not impossible per se, but depending on how popular a particular device was in its day, finding spare parts can be very time-consuming. Still, I agree. I have a 2008 netbook at home I still use regularly, and I hardly throw away a computer that still basically works.

rdtsc 11y ago

> POWER is the only architecture currently competitive with Intel in terms of raw performance, and boots using a fully FOSS firmware with no DRM antifeatures embedded. That's pretty cool. This combined with some benchmarks I saw for server workload on POWER8 will hopefully revive some interest in the platform.

lasermike026 11y ago

Dependence on a few companies to design and make processors will not work in the long term. Open source processor design that can be manufactured by anyone is the way out of this problem. Even if this never happens the attempt to go there is enough to make the large companies involved with cpus beg and serve.

profeta 11y ago

They tested the waters with GPUs. after nobody complained at all, they just moved to CPUs.

rcarmo 11y ago

When I saw RISCV mentioned as an alternative, I had to check the date twice to make sure it wasn't an April Fools'. I understand the concerns and all, but wish the alternatives were a little better picked out. Most people already mentioned SPARC and ARM as alternatives, so I won't delve into those arguments other than point out that there will _always_ be commercial interests at stake here - hardware, unlike software, requires considerable material resources to create* and distribute (and is still harder - and therefore rarer - to create for its own sake), so there won't be a wide variety of viable options out there, and new CPU architectures don't grow on trees. Better to lobby for open specs on the "offending" bits of hardware, really. * - yes, software creation can also require material resources (and a whole lot of time, which can be expensive). Let's not belabor that point...

Animats 11y ago

The way to blow this wide open is to catch Intel's "management engine" doing something really bad and publicize it. It could do for Intel what John German did for Volkswagen AG.[1] One approach would be to build some honeypots likely to attract attention. Give them a job that's not too traffic intensive but is suspicious, such as encrypted IRC. Record all traffic in and out of the box using external hardware. Get them fake encrypted traffic from suspicious sources (Tor, strange sites in suspicious countries, etc.) Wait for strange packets to show up that are not meaningful to the host software but cause something to happen on the target. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34519184 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34519184

cdkersey 11y ago

It seems superficial to concentrate on a few kilobytes of binary blobs as a security issue when millions of logic gates are also hidden from user scrutiny by design in most computers. That the number of people you have to trust now includes firmware developers in addition to hardware designers is a small movement in the scheme of things, though it may be a movement in an undesirable direction.

daveheq 11y ago

Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.

daveheq 11y ago

Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.

zvrba 11y ago

This is a one-sided view. It can, and also is, used to implement theft-protection, thanks to which the police tracked the guy, he got convicted and I got my expensive laptop back. Yes, the guy reinstalled the OS, but the tracking SW survived precisely thanks to these technologies.

brokenmachine 11y ago
Can you give more details on what OS and tracking SW you were using?
- zvrba 11y ago
  Absolute LoJack, with windows. It installs itself as a windows driver before/during the boot. It sends location once a day, or more often if you flag the device as stolen/missing. It can also remotely "brick" the device (yes, it can be undone by the owner) if the data is of concern. I deliberately did not set BIOS password so that the laptop remained usable to whomever got their hands on it.

lazyjones 11y ago

Opterons from 2011-2012 are still available and seem to be the best option to me for this purpose. They're reasonably performant (16 cores...), affordable and there are plenty of mainboard options. Software support is excellent of course. I'm just not sure how valid the "pre-2013 AMD is safe" claim is, since vendors have been known to include some remote management technology like Intel's ME in earlier versions before making it a standard feature.