4 ms·

Hey HN, I'm one of the engineers on the team behind Titan, feel free to AMA.

by bluegate010 9y ago

convery 9y ago
What did you have for breakfast?
- bluegate010 9y ago
  Spicy raisin bars, an old family recipe. And a cucumber.
puzzle 9y ago
Does LOAS use Titan, then? https://twitter.com/jbeda/status/715373975182807040 https://twitter.com/jbeda/status/715373975182807040 Will you convince Niels to publish a paper?
- nellydpa 9y ago
  Great question. We are working on it. LOAS is about server or device credentials that only will be issued if Titan will pass the validation of bios firmware. re: Niels paper, out of my control.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    When asked about releasing a paper a few months ago at Next, it didn't sound like a high priority, maybe because it wasn't too exciting or not too many people would be interested. I disagree, but perhaps, if enough people ask Niels or whoever else makes the call, something might happen.
polygot 9y ago
This looks like a pretty cool project. How much research went into creating Titan? Why did Google decide to create a custom hardware-based solution (Titan) instead of using something off the shelf, like Intel's Secure Boot?
- bluegate010 9y ago
  With Titan we know exactly how it is designed and how it'll behave. Titan is also platform-agnostic; it can work in many environments that Secure Boot cannot. Secure Boot also doesn't get us nifty features like tamper-evident logging or hardware root-of-trust. Edit: See [0] where Titan was first briefly introduced earlier this year, for an image of it attached to one of our custom networking cards. [0] https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/bolstering-security-across-google-cloud/ https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/bolstering-secur...
kop316 9y ago
Hello! I am curious about a couple of things: Assuming you use Intel chips, how do you manage to trust the firmware/ME from them? Do you write your own BIOS to ensure that it is safe? Or do you use ARM/PowerPC/other ISA and have an entirely open source stack? Does the Titan assume no phyiscal access? And if you do assume someone could steal the chip/try to reverse engineer the chip, do you have anything in it to stop an adversery? I would wonder if there would be a private/nation state agency would want access to certain secrets so bad that they would try to alter it physically, rather then through root access.
- bluegate010 9y ago
  Both the Titan chip and all software that runs on it are designed entirely in-house, so we have full control over the stack. And we do have physical tampering countermeasures in place.
ec109685 9y ago
How do you guard against the CPU itself doing nefarious things? Is the idea that the firmware is much easier to skip in a back door?
- bluegate010 9y ago
  Titan is just one of several measures we take to harden our stack, and helps us be confident in the software we run. It's a good point though, there are no absolutes in security.
sannee 9y ago
> Once Titan has booted its own firmware in a secure fashion, it will turn its attention to the host’s boot firmware flash, and verify its contents using public key cryptography. Titan can gate PCH/BMC access to the boot firmware flash until after it has verified the flash content, at which point it signals readiness to release the rest of the machine from reset Can I serve a different firmware image after the verification goes through and the PCH starts loading the flash? :)
- bluegate010 9y ago
  If the flash chip holding the boot firmware isn't really a flash chip, then indeed this could present an issue. However, since Titan interposes between flash and the PCH/BMC, it can observe the bytes actually being served.
FractalNerve 9y ago
Hi BlueGate010 :) your name reminds to IBM. Is Titan your internal weapon against the NSA?
- bluegate010 9y ago
  Titan is one of the tools we use to protect against tampering, even down to the bootloader.

Hey HN, I'm one of the engineers on the team behind Titan, feel free to AMA.

convery 9y ago

What did you have for breakfast?

bluegate010 9y ago
Spicy raisin bars, an old family recipe. And a cucumber.

puzzle 9y ago

Does LOAS use Titan, then? https://twitter.com/jbeda/status/715373975182807040 https://twitter.com/jbeda/status/715373975182807040 Will you convince Niels to publish a paper?

nellydpa 9y ago
Great question. We are working on it. LOAS is about server or device credentials that only will be issued if Titan will pass the validation of bios firmware. re: Niels paper, out of my control.
- puzzle 9y ago
  When asked about releasing a paper a few months ago at Next, it didn't sound like a high priority, maybe because it wasn't too exciting or not too many people would be interested. I disagree, but perhaps, if enough people ask Niels or whoever else makes the call, something might happen.

polygot 9y ago

This looks like a pretty cool project. How much research went into creating Titan? Why did Google decide to create a custom hardware-based solution (Titan) instead of using something off the shelf, like Intel's Secure Boot?

bluegate010 9y ago
With Titan we know exactly how it is designed and how it'll behave. Titan is also platform-agnostic; it can work in many environments that Secure Boot cannot. Secure Boot also doesn't get us nifty features like tamper-evident logging or hardware root-of-trust. Edit: See [0] where Titan was first briefly introduced earlier this year, for an image of it attached to one of our custom networking cards. [0] https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/bolstering-security-across-google-cloud/ https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/bolstering-secur...

kop316 9y ago

Hello! I am curious about a couple of things: Assuming you use Intel chips, how do you manage to trust the firmware/ME from them? Do you write your own BIOS to ensure that it is safe? Or do you use ARM/PowerPC/other ISA and have an entirely open source stack? Does the Titan assume no phyiscal access? And if you do assume someone could steal the chip/try to reverse engineer the chip, do you have anything in it to stop an adversery? I would wonder if there would be a private/nation state agency would want access to certain secrets so bad that they would try to alter it physically, rather then through root access.

bluegate010 9y ago
Both the Titan chip and all software that runs on it are designed entirely in-house, so we have full control over the stack. And we do have physical tampering countermeasures in place.

ec109685 9y ago

How do you guard against the CPU itself doing nefarious things? Is the idea that the firmware is much easier to skip in a back door?

bluegate010 9y ago
Titan is just one of several measures we take to harden our stack, and helps us be confident in the software we run. It's a good point though, there are no absolutes in security.

sannee 9y ago

> Once Titan has booted its own firmware in a secure fashion, it will turn its attention to the host’s boot firmware flash, and verify its contents using public key cryptography. Titan can gate PCH/BMC access to the boot firmware flash until after it has verified the flash content, at which point it signals readiness to release the rest of the machine from reset Can I serve a different firmware image after the verification goes through and the PCH starts loading the flash? :)

bluegate010 9y ago
If the flash chip holding the boot firmware isn't really a flash chip, then indeed this could present an issue. However, since Titan interposes between flash and the PCH/BMC, it can observe the bytes actually being served.

FractalNerve 9y ago

Hi BlueGate010 :) your name reminds to IBM. Is Titan your internal weapon against the NSA?

bluegate010 9y ago
Titan is one of the tools we use to protect against tampering, even down to the bootloader.