6 ms·
Buy drives with FIPS 140-2 certification. At least then you know a third party lab has reviewed the implementation.
by pmorici 8y ago
Buy drives with FIPS 140-2 certification. At least then you know a third party lab has reviewed the implementation.
- tptacek 8y agoIt is almost definitely not the case that FIPS certification of any kind reliably informs you that a capable crypto engineer verified the implementation.
- kop316 8y agoRespectfully, I'll need a citation on that.
- tptacek 8y agoSure. Find any device crypto vulnerability, and check to see if the device was FIPS 140-2 certified. For instance, Infineon with their batshit RNG (the ROCA vulnerability).
- kop316 8y agoSo looking at the ROCA vulnerability, it looks like the vulnerability wwas with how the primes were generated, not with the correctness of the actual crypto algorithm. Fips typically certifies that the algorithm is correct, but it can't be faulted for bad primes. So I'm still going to have to ask for an actual citation Edit: I also didn't see where that device is Fips certified either
- tptacek 8y agoFips typically certifies that the algorithm is correct, but it can't be faulted for bad primes I think I rest my case.
- kop316 8y agoHow? I honestly don't follow your logic at all.
- toast0 8y agoTreating a certification of algorithm correctness as a certification of a well engineered product is a poor choice, because many security critical things in the product are not considered in the certification.
- kop316 8y agoThat makes a lot of sense, thank you! I got the impression that the parent comment meant that the certification itself means nothing, hence my confusion.
- toast0 8y agoI mean; a crypto certification that doesn't tell you very much about the effective security of the product doesn't provide very much value though, does it? All it tells me, is that someone thought it would increase their sales enough to justify the time and money; they may not have spent time and money to generate random numbers properly, and may just use 4 all the time; they could probably still get a fips cert, because it's out of the scope of the certification.
- tptacek 8y agoPretty much, yep.
- SmallDeadGuy 8y agoIn this SSD case, if they only certified the algorithm then all the SSDs would be fine (probably). The encryption itself is probably good and wouldn't be easily broken if you only had access to the encrypted data. It's the key generation and usage outside of the algorithm that is broken in these drives.
- pmorici 8y agoDoes your argument boil down to any review process that doesn’t catch 100% of problems is worthless? I don’t think anyone claims fips certification is always going to garuntee perfection but it’s better than nothing. It also stipulates things like tamper evident seals which would mitigate attacks that need jtag access to muck with firmware.
- mjevans 8y agoIf the algorithm is FIPS 140-2 compliant but the key-handling/checking fails best practices...