5 ms·

It's surprising that everyone is up in arms about AMT and ME while not complaining in the slightest about SGX. SGX allows third parties to run code on your proc

by ccrush 9y ago

It's surprising that everyone is up in arms about AMT and ME while not complaining in the slightest about SGX. SGX allows third parties to run code on your processor that is outside of your control. We're losing our computers to corporate interests. You are buying a device they can remotely manage, exert control with a higher privilege than yours, hide secrets inside your machine, and make all the decisions for you. To be even more dramatic, you are purchasing your own enslavement.

noja 9y ago
SGX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions
MichaelGG 9y ago
SGX, if they allow arbitrary code to be signed, is amazing. It enables remote trust. You could execute jobs "in the cloud" without anyone being able to see your data. You could write a known-correct coin tumbler or trading platform. If it does only get locked to a few code authors, that would be a tremendous shame.
- woah 9y ago
  If Intel is the one source of ultimate trust, why not just run your secure whatever on Intel's servers? Seems a lot less complex than jumping through all these SGX hoops.
  - 801699 9y ago
    companies that make the bios were* the other sources of "ultimate trust". why not let them... *then came uefi. hoop-jumping never a problem with the i.t. market. more complexity is fine so long as managed by someone else. only the sales pitch needs to be simple. why is it unfathomable that users could only trust themselves and other users? continual push toward more complexity helps keep users from ever believing this is achievable.
- SXX 9y ago
  Yeah it's will bring new amazing spyware and ransomware on millions of PCs.
  - mycall 9y ago
    Or plausible deniability.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    Can you explain how, exactly? Spyware would need to call out to system APIs to do anything useful, and that's not something that can be done inside an enclave. Sure, it'd let you be a bit sloppier with randomware, not needing public key crypto to make it all work. Not really a huge deal.
    - SXX 9y ago
      Yes I can. In past there was many cases when normal software and even distributed drivers contained different kind of malware. After some point someone find it and it's become detectable, there was scandal and way to remove it. Also there was very serious risk that if some company put backdoor into their software it's will be found and company will be sued at least. If something like SGX become publicly available then a lot of proprietary software and content manufacturers going to use it for DRM purposes. So efficiently it's will be everywhere. Now imagine that every company can put sleeping backdoor in their software that can't be found by reverse engineering. Then they can activate it on demand for purposes of industrial espionage. Or they can simply ship own version of backdoor to ever customer and then pretend it's was some "bug" when someone detected it's activity.
      - MichaelGG 9y ago
        I think you might not understand SGX's capability. It's just a compute kernel. So if they're taking data from your system, that's still very visible. And if they are sending data, that's also visible. So, sure, it's handy to hide logic. So the WannaCry thing, you'd be able to see it does DNS queries, but not how it determined a certain outcome based on the inputs. But you can't hide, for instance, a keylogger.
dom0 9y ago
Technology isn't intrinsically good or evil. It's how it's used, like the death ray.
johncolanduoni 9y ago
The reason is that SGX doesn't do remotely the same thing that AMT and ME do. Code that uses SGX doesn't gain privileges it didn't have (in fact, it loses privileges even compared to normal usermode code). It can be scheduled/killed by the OS the same as any other user code, and the feature can be disabled wholesale via firmware (the processor will not shutdown after 30 minutes like it does when ME is prevented from running). The code running in the enclave is also not encrypted; only data it generates at runtime is, so you can inspect it and decide whether you want to run it just fine. Kernels can't even use it directly, so I'm not sure how SGX helps anybody "make all the decisions for you". In fact, SGX is probably the only way to get some semblance of a defense against compromised ME and SMM code. There's even a number of open source projects that use it (e.g. [0]). To be even more dramatic, not every acronym Intel comes up with is Pure Evil. [0]: https://github.com/ayeks/TresorSGX https://github.com/ayeks/TresorSGX
Paul-ish 9y ago
SGX is the ultimate DRM. Once SGX programs talk directly to monitors that support some HDCP like protocol, it will be the end of ad/tracker blockers. Web pages will run in SGX land.
- johncolanduoni 9y ago
  The ultimate DRM is a system that runs unencrypted code with unencrypted inputs/outputs (i.e. trivially simulated) with an attestation mechanism for providing some evidence that the output is in fact from that algorithm? The most DRM-ish thing I can think of doing with that is making sure that e.g. your browser runs whatever script the server sends, except you can feed it fake data (it can't communicate with the outside world except through code you control) and you can view and modify the code and run it in parallel outside SGX. Hardly ultimate.

by ccrush 9y ago

noja 9y ago

SGX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions

MichaelGG 9y ago

SGX, if they allow arbitrary code to be signed, is amazing. It enables remote trust. You could execute jobs "in the cloud" without anyone being able to see your data. You could write a known-correct coin tumbler or trading platform. If it does only get locked to a few code authors, that would be a tremendous shame.

woah 9y ago
If Intel is the one source of ultimate trust, why not just run your secure whatever on Intel's servers? Seems a lot less complex than jumping through all these SGX hoops.
- 801699 9y ago
  companies that make the bios were* the other sources of "ultimate trust". why not let them... *then came uefi. hoop-jumping never a problem with the i.t. market. more complexity is fine so long as managed by someone else. only the sales pitch needs to be simple. why is it unfathomable that users could only trust themselves and other users? continual push toward more complexity helps keep users from ever believing this is achievable.
SXX 9y ago
Yeah it's will bring new amazing spyware and ransomware on millions of PCs.
- mycall 9y ago
  Or plausible deniability.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Can you explain how, exactly? Spyware would need to call out to system APIs to do anything useful, and that's not something that can be done inside an enclave. Sure, it'd let you be a bit sloppier with randomware, not needing public key crypto to make it all work. Not really a huge deal.
  - SXX 9y ago
    Yes I can. In past there was many cases when normal software and even distributed drivers contained different kind of malware. After some point someone find it and it's become detectable, there was scandal and way to remove it. Also there was very serious risk that if some company put backdoor into their software it's will be found and company will be sued at least. If something like SGX become publicly available then a lot of proprietary software and content manufacturers going to use it for DRM purposes. So efficiently it's will be everywhere. Now imagine that every company can put sleeping backdoor in their software that can't be found by reverse engineering. Then they can activate it on demand for purposes of industrial espionage. Or they can simply ship own version of backdoor to ever customer and then pretend it's was some "bug" when someone detected it's activity.
    - MichaelGG 9y ago
      I think you might not understand SGX's capability. It's just a compute kernel. So if they're taking data from your system, that's still very visible. And if they are sending data, that's also visible. So, sure, it's handy to hide logic. So the WannaCry thing, you'd be able to see it does DNS queries, but not how it determined a certain outcome based on the inputs. But you can't hide, for instance, a keylogger.

dom0 9y ago

Technology isn't intrinsically good or evil. It's how it's used, like the death ray.

johncolanduoni 9y ago

The reason is that SGX doesn't do remotely the same thing that AMT and ME do. Code that uses SGX doesn't gain privileges it didn't have (in fact, it loses privileges even compared to normal usermode code). It can be scheduled/killed by the OS the same as any other user code, and the feature can be disabled wholesale via firmware (the processor will not shutdown after 30 minutes like it does when ME is prevented from running). The code running in the enclave is also not encrypted; only data it generates at runtime is, so you can inspect it and decide whether you want to run it just fine. Kernels can't even use it directly, so I'm not sure how SGX helps anybody "make all the decisions for you". In fact, SGX is probably the only way to get some semblance of a defense against compromised ME and SMM code. There's even a number of open source projects that use it (e.g. [0]). To be even more dramatic, not every acronym Intel comes up with is Pure Evil. [0]: https://github.com/ayeks/TresorSGX https://github.com/ayeks/TresorSGX

Paul-ish 9y ago

SGX is the ultimate DRM. Once SGX programs talk directly to monitors that support some HDCP like protocol, it will be the end of ad/tracker blockers. Web pages will run in SGX land.

johncolanduoni 9y ago
The ultimate DRM is a system that runs unencrypted code with unencrypted inputs/outputs (i.e. trivially simulated) with an attestation mechanism for providing some evidence that the output is in fact from that algorithm? The most DRM-ish thing I can think of doing with that is making sure that e.g. your browser runs whatever script the server sends, except you can feed it fake data (it can't communicate with the outside world except through code you control) and you can view and modify the code and run it in parallel outside SGX. Hardly ultimate.