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Trends in mainstream believing. Intel is backdooring all their chips: true. NSA is spying on all of us: true. Marketers are fingerprinting us in sophisticate

by mcosta 6y ago

Trends in mainstream believing. Intel is backdooring all their chips: true. NSA is spying on all of us: true. Marketers are fingerprinting us in sophisticated ways (example: browser cache timing attacks): true. China is bugging motherboards: false.

johnklos 6y ago
...and you know this for a fact how, exactly? Where's your data? Where's your research?
sudosysgen 6y ago
The first three aren't believed. They were proven. The Intel ME (and AMD PSP) are literally physically indistinguishable from a backdoor. NSA spying was proven by Snowden et al. Marketers fingerprinting us to the level that personal targeting is possible was proven. Is it possible that China is bugging motherboards? Yes. But if they are, it should not be difficult at all to prove. Just buy some motherboards and analyze the chips to find where the backdoor is. The fact that in over two years that still hasn't been done is just very suspicious. If someone is making a large claim but not providing information that can be found using public, verifiable sources, then it's very reasonable to doubt it. Evidence isn't based purely on what seems right. If hard evidence can be provided but isn't, why should I believe you?
- evilos 6y ago
  > Just buy some motherboards and analyze the chips to find where the backdoor is If you were bugging motherboards, you would surely anticipate this. Some possible mitigations include only bugging a subset of the motherboards, and bugging them in ways that make them physically indistinguishable from a normal unit. Modified silicon or firmware would be very hard to detect. > The fact that in over two years that still hasn't been done is just very suspicious. If someone is making a large claim but not providing information that can be found using public, verifiable sources, then it's very reasonable to doubt it. If the bugged hardware is rare (it would be if the attackers were smart), then the public would not have access to it and the government agencies looking into this may still well be investigating this or keeping it quiet for whatever reason. I'm not convinced either way on this situation, but it's far from impossible that the allegations are true and it is seems worth discussing.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Of course. But it's been two years now. There are many civilians that would have such bugged motherboards, and they've had two years now to find out where the flaw is. Including civilian organizations that Bloomberg explicitly said were targeted. That said, about this : Modified silicon or firmware would be very hard to detect. This is not compatible with the mechanism Bloomberg is proposing. They are suggesting that some silicon in the motherboard is intercepting memory in real-time, processing it, and modifying it on-the-fly to make the CPU do what is wanted. That is not something that can be done by merely modifying existing silicon. RAM is directly, physically connected to the CPU. You would need to add an extremely high performance chip that shouldn't be there between the CPU and the RAM, and there is simply no way to hide that. Firmware attacks are possible, yes, but you can readout the content of firmware chips too. It's not a mechanism of attack that could be done invisibly. At the easiest, you could detect it by a timing attack, at the worst you can just x-ray the board. But it cannot be invisible.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >That is not something that can be done by merely modifying existing silicon. RAM is directly, physically connected to the CPU. You would need to add an extremely high performance chip that shouldn't be there between the CPU and the RAM, and there is simply no way to hide that. Why? Look at the die shot[1] of a zen 2 IO die (manufactured using 14 nm process), and see how small the DDR4 PHY blocks are in comparison to the rest of the chip. Then consider the whole picture only covers 9.3mm x 13.2mm. If you only cared about manipulating a few bits of the DDR4 data bus, I don't see why the package has to so large that you can't hide it. You could also go for the opposite approach (ie. rather than decoding the signal and injecting the correct signal, you introduce a glitch at the analog level, similar to how rowhammer works). [1] https://forum.level1techs.com/uploads/default/original/3X/0/5/05587a80460d444d59dc7d0a41507b3f9905b03f.jpeg https://forum.level1techs.com/uploads/default/original/3X/0/... [2] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13852/cpu44_678x452.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13852/cpu44_678x452.jpg
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
boringg 6y ago
Probably should add in Russia. They are a far more sophisticated threat than China is (at this point in time) when it comes to network infiltration and security breaches. I don't think anyone would be surprised if china was bugging motherboards - probably the extensiveness and efficacy would be the big shocks.
- canada_dry 6y ago
  > a far more sophisticated threat than China is I'd say Russia is bolder and will take more risks than China, but China - technologically - is quite likely much further ahead than Russia. The resources ($$$ and PhD) at China's disposal are magnitudes larger than Russia - and perhaps greater than the US (in effective spent<->result).

by mcosta 6y ago

johnklos 6y ago

...and you know this for a fact how, exactly? Where's your data? Where's your research?

sudosysgen 6y ago

The first three aren't believed. They were proven. The Intel ME (and AMD PSP) are literally physically indistinguishable from a backdoor. NSA spying was proven by Snowden et al. Marketers fingerprinting us to the level that personal targeting is possible was proven. Is it possible that China is bugging motherboards? Yes. But if they are, it should not be difficult at all to prove. Just buy some motherboards and analyze the chips to find where the backdoor is. The fact that in over two years that still hasn't been done is just very suspicious. If someone is making a large claim but not providing information that can be found using public, verifiable sources, then it's very reasonable to doubt it. Evidence isn't based purely on what seems right. If hard evidence can be provided but isn't, why should I believe you?

evilos 6y ago
> Just buy some motherboards and analyze the chips to find where the backdoor is If you were bugging motherboards, you would surely anticipate this. Some possible mitigations include only bugging a subset of the motherboards, and bugging them in ways that make them physically indistinguishable from a normal unit. Modified silicon or firmware would be very hard to detect. > The fact that in over two years that still hasn't been done is just very suspicious. If someone is making a large claim but not providing information that can be found using public, verifiable sources, then it's very reasonable to doubt it. If the bugged hardware is rare (it would be if the attackers were smart), then the public would not have access to it and the government agencies looking into this may still well be investigating this or keeping it quiet for whatever reason. I'm not convinced either way on this situation, but it's far from impossible that the allegations are true and it is seems worth discussing.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Of course. But it's been two years now. There are many civilians that would have such bugged motherboards, and they've had two years now to find out where the flaw is. Including civilian organizations that Bloomberg explicitly said were targeted. That said, about this : Modified silicon or firmware would be very hard to detect. This is not compatible with the mechanism Bloomberg is proposing. They are suggesting that some silicon in the motherboard is intercepting memory in real-time, processing it, and modifying it on-the-fly to make the CPU do what is wanted. That is not something that can be done by merely modifying existing silicon. RAM is directly, physically connected to the CPU. You would need to add an extremely high performance chip that shouldn't be there between the CPU and the RAM, and there is simply no way to hide that. Firmware attacks are possible, yes, but you can readout the content of firmware chips too. It's not a mechanism of attack that could be done invisibly. At the easiest, you could detect it by a timing attack, at the worst you can just x-ray the board. But it cannot be invisible.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >That is not something that can be done by merely modifying existing silicon. RAM is directly, physically connected to the CPU. You would need to add an extremely high performance chip that shouldn't be there between the CPU and the RAM, and there is simply no way to hide that. Why? Look at the die shot[1] of a zen 2 IO die (manufactured using 14 nm process), and see how small the DDR4 PHY blocks are in comparison to the rest of the chip. Then consider the whole picture only covers 9.3mm x 13.2mm. If you only cared about manipulating a few bits of the DDR4 data bus, I don't see why the package has to so large that you can't hide it. You could also go for the opposite approach (ie. rather than decoding the signal and injecting the correct signal, you introduce a glitch at the analog level, similar to how rowhammer works). [1] https://forum.level1techs.com/uploads/default/original/3X/0/5/05587a80460d444d59dc7d0a41507b3f9905b03f.jpeg https://forum.level1techs.com/uploads/default/original/3X/0/... [2] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13852/cpu44_678x452.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13852/cpu44_678x452.jpg
    - sudosysgen 6y ago

boringg 6y ago

Probably should add in Russia. They are a far more sophisticated threat than China is (at this point in time) when it comes to network infiltration and security breaches. I don't think anyone would be surprised if china was bugging motherboards - probably the extensiveness and efficacy would be the big shocks.

canada_dry 6y ago
> a far more sophisticated threat than China is I'd say Russia is bolder and will take more risks than China, but China - technologically - is quite likely much further ahead than Russia. The resources ($$$ and PhD) at China's disposal are magnitudes larger than Russia - and perhaps greater than the US (in effective spent<->result).