5 ms·

What bothers me is that they did not responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities to the manufacturers ahead of time. This is not moral, and I'm not sure what one g

What bothers me is that they did not responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities to the manufacturers ahead of time. This is not moral, and I'm not sure what one gains by not doing that. I think that conference organizers should pressure presenters to do that before talks. Either that or attendees should apply bottom up pressure and ask live questions like "what did you do to responsibly disclose this issue?". I think I'll do that on future security conferences I attend.

32032141 8y ago
I've been doing security research in this industry for a while and it's effectively not worth anybodies time to attempt to report hardware wallet, or software bugs 'responsibly'. I've found that by far the most common responses are being told that the attack doesn't fit into their design (as here), it's not reasonable to expect, or that for some reason. For a long time the Trezor wallets custom crypto library was simply python transliterated and had a sidechannel attack so large that you could measure the EC multiply operation with a SDR from across a room. This was supposedly out of their scope (but has been since somewhat fixed, but not entirely) for some reason, despite being something that is easily fixed using industry standard constant time operations. Responses you do get at protecting the fact that a lot of the bugs are burned into hardware and can't be fixed by anything but them re-issuing it. It's not in the interests to ever acknowledge issues.
- wbl 8y ago
  Power analysis is a lot harder to fix then you think. Constant time isn't enough: you probably need blinding and some hardware assistance with features that are inevitably under NDA.
  - 32032141 8y ago
    This is true. Many of these devices are using effectively joke crypto libraries however, theres a world of difference between something that needs a sophisticated setup, and the python crypto library that was transliterated into C and makes absolutely no effort at being constant time. The original Trezor software took something in the order of 300ms to produce a single signature. You could probably have done recovery of the nonce from ec multiply with a stopwatch. If your security appliance is using an ECDSA library for Arduino that has absolutely zero tests or review, you just outright lost. Some of the more well known products in the space do exactly this. https://github.com/kmackay/micro-ecc/blob/master/test/test_ecdsa.c https://github.com/kmackay/micro-ecc/blob/master/test/test_e...
Canada 8y ago
I wish the everyone would stop using the term "responsible" to describe "coordinated" disclosure. Researchers do not owe vendors any cooperation at all. It is perfectly moral to present factual information without any notice whatsoever. I think there's often something to gain through coordinated disclosure, but not always, and it's not your choice to make unless we're talking about your own findings.
- 32032141 8y ago
  Agreed. Researchers owe the companies absolutely nothing.
  - anonymouzz 8y ago
    It's not about the companies. I do not care much about them. It's about people that may be hacked between someone's 0day disclosure and manufacturer's response. And if the manufacturer doesn't care to fix the bug - roast them about that. It's their fault. It's not moral because people (not companies) may suffer. Your actions have consequences.
    - jstanley 8y ago
      The vulnerability doesn't pop into existence the second it is publicly announced. It was already there. Everybody was already vulnerable. At least if it's publicly announced people can take steps to defend against it.
      - anonymouzz 8y ago
        Yes but why not send a single email to the manufacturer before making it public? Does it really hurt so much? From a "cyberpunk hacker" mentality this only gives you an opportunity to roast the manufacturer if they do nothing. Perhaps even bankrupt them, I don't care. Competition will take their places and hopefully be better.
        tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago

32032141 8y ago

I've been doing security research in this industry for a while and it's effectively not worth anybodies time to attempt to report hardware wallet, or software bugs 'responsibly'. I've found that by far the most common responses are being told that the attack doesn't fit into their design (as here), it's not reasonable to expect, or that for some reason. For a long time the Trezor wallets custom crypto library was simply python transliterated and had a sidechannel attack so large that you could measure the EC multiply operation with a SDR from across a room. This was supposedly out of their scope (but has been since somewhat fixed, but not entirely) for some reason, despite being something that is easily fixed using industry standard constant time operations. Responses you do get at protecting the fact that a lot of the bugs are burned into hardware and can't be fixed by anything but them re-issuing it. It's not in the interests to ever acknowledge issues.

wbl 8y ago
Power analysis is a lot harder to fix then you think. Constant time isn't enough: you probably need blinding and some hardware assistance with features that are inevitably under NDA.
- 32032141 8y ago
  This is true. Many of these devices are using effectively joke crypto libraries however, theres a world of difference between something that needs a sophisticated setup, and the python crypto library that was transliterated into C and makes absolutely no effort at being constant time. The original Trezor software took something in the order of 300ms to produce a single signature. You could probably have done recovery of the nonce from ec multiply with a stopwatch. If your security appliance is using an ECDSA library for Arduino that has absolutely zero tests or review, you just outright lost. Some of the more well known products in the space do exactly this. https://github.com/kmackay/micro-ecc/blob/master/test/test_ecdsa.c https://github.com/kmackay/micro-ecc/blob/master/test/test_e...

Canada 8y ago

I wish the everyone would stop using the term "responsible" to describe "coordinated" disclosure. Researchers do not owe vendors any cooperation at all. It is perfectly moral to present factual information without any notice whatsoever. I think there's often something to gain through coordinated disclosure, but not always, and it's not your choice to make unless we're talking about your own findings.

32032141 8y ago
Agreed. Researchers owe the companies absolutely nothing.
- anonymouzz 8y ago
  It's not about the companies. I do not care much about them. It's about people that may be hacked between someone's 0day disclosure and manufacturer's response. And if the manufacturer doesn't care to fix the bug - roast them about that. It's their fault. It's not moral because people (not companies) may suffer. Your actions have consequences.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    The vulnerability doesn't pop into existence the second it is publicly announced. It was already there. Everybody was already vulnerable. At least if it's publicly announced people can take steps to defend against it.
    - anonymouzz 8y ago
      Yes but why not send a single email to the manufacturer before making it public? Does it really hurt so much? From a "cyberpunk hacker" mentality this only gives you an opportunity to roast the manufacturer if they do nothing. Perhaps even bankrupt them, I don't care. Competition will take their places and hopefully be better.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago