4 ms·

Technology needs an immune system. 'Tamper evident' is the right approach, but achieving this in a way that consumers can use is hard and requires building bloc

Technology needs an immune system. 'Tamper evident' is the right approach, but achieving this in a way that consumers can use is hard and requires building blocks that don't exist yet. How can you verify that the motherboard you sent out is the one you get back and it doesn't have extra hardware inside the case? msft isn't wrong that creating a trusted supply chain for hardware is difficult, but I think that 'how can I trust the repair shop' and 'how can I trust MS' are the same problem.

devoply 7y ago
The real threat is not tampering, the real threat is from the manufacturer and the corporations that already have keys to the data kingdom and control the entire stack. I have yet to hear of a single case of hardware tampering as software tampering is much much easier and infinitely more effective... and even if hardware tampering happens it's an extreme edge case and almost irrelevant.
- solotronics 7y ago
  This kind of blurs the line between hardware and software but there have been recent attacks where groups have written attack firmwares to motherboards and hard drives of cloud computing baremetal servers.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    It's still software. It's just software that most application programmers ignore by inclination.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Are there known cases of hardware tampering exploits, and how many of them are done by state actors as opposed to private ones? Also, how many of the known cases are indeterminate in that way? (state vs private) Restricting the public access to hardware will encourage more state hardware tampering.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Are you asking if things have gotten more subtle since 1945? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
mindslight 7y ago
> How can you verify that the motherboard you sent out is the one you get back and it doesn't have extra hardware inside the case? It is certainly not by obscuring the contents and revisions of that motherboard, such that end users can only trust it as an opaque blob. In software land, we're smitten with this assumption that security can be made absolute. While this is true for software (Curry-Howard), it is not true for anything else (eg it's easy to cut a car's brake lines). Real world safety depends on local control, post-facto enforcement, and a general lack of maliciousness. Whereas with software we're dealing with remote access and extreme scalability (eg remotely disable the brakes on all cars of a certain make/year for the lulz, untraceably). Attempting to extend the software security paradigm (public key authoritarianism) onto hardware is completely wrong. Device security needs to be focused on mitigating software's own "winner take all" failure mode, rather than attempting to move even more eggs into one basket.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  If you cut a car brake line, as long as you're allowed to look under the hood/vehicle then you'll see the brake fluid, and see the reservoir is low.
Reelin 7y ago
> How can you verify that the motherboard you sent out is the one you get back Have your TPM cryptographically validate the components it's attached to. Coupled with a robust blinding implementation, you're only really trusting the chip manufacturers (and their tamper proofing of the silicon) at that point. Add an ownership model to the TPM and you've solved anti-theft. Then allow for the addition and removal of authorized components by the owner and you've preserved the right to repair. > and it doesn't have extra hardware inside the case This is the real issue I suppose. I prefer choosing to trust a particular repair shop over gluing it all together and hoping for the best.

devoply 7y ago

The real threat is not tampering, the real threat is from the manufacturer and the corporations that already have keys to the data kingdom and control the entire stack. I have yet to hear of a single case of hardware tampering as software tampering is much much easier and infinitely more effective... and even if hardware tampering happens it's an extreme edge case and almost irrelevant.

solotronics 7y ago
This kind of blurs the line between hardware and software but there have been recent attacks where groups have written attack firmwares to motherboards and hard drives of cloud computing baremetal servers.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  It's still software. It's just software that most application programmers ignore by inclination.
stcredzero 7y ago
Are there known cases of hardware tampering exploits, and how many of them are done by state actors as opposed to private ones? Also, how many of the known cases are indeterminate in that way? (state vs private) Restricting the public access to hardware will encourage more state hardware tampering.
- carapace 7y ago
  Are you asking if things have gotten more subtle since 1945? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

mindslight 7y ago

> How can you verify that the motherboard you sent out is the one you get back and it doesn't have extra hardware inside the case? It is certainly not by obscuring the contents and revisions of that motherboard, such that end users can only trust it as an opaque blob. In software land, we're smitten with this assumption that security can be made absolute. While this is true for software (Curry-Howard), it is not true for anything else (eg it's easy to cut a car's brake lines). Real world safety depends on local control, post-facto enforcement, and a general lack of maliciousness. Whereas with software we're dealing with remote access and extreme scalability (eg remotely disable the brakes on all cars of a certain make/year for the lulz, untraceably). Attempting to extend the software security paradigm (public key authoritarianism) onto hardware is completely wrong. Device security needs to be focused on mitigating software's own "winner take all" failure mode, rather than attempting to move even more eggs into one basket.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
If you cut a car brake line, as long as you're allowed to look under the hood/vehicle then you'll see the brake fluid, and see the reservoir is low.

Reelin 7y ago

> How can you verify that the motherboard you sent out is the one you get back Have your TPM cryptographically validate the components it's attached to. Coupled with a robust blinding implementation, you're only really trusting the chip manufacturers (and their tamper proofing of the silicon) at that point. Add an ownership model to the TPM and you've solved anti-theft. Then allow for the addition and removal of authorized components by the owner and you've preserved the right to repair. > and it doesn't have extra hardware inside the case This is the real issue I suppose. I prefer choosing to trust a particular repair shop over gluing it all together and hoping for the best.