4 ms·
Years ago we were hopeful that the TPM would solve this problem, yay I rejoiced - a HSM on every computer. Just think of the possibilities! Aside from the spec
by quesomaster9000 4y ago
Years ago we were hopeful that the TPM would solve this problem, yay I rejoiced - a HSM on every computer. Just think of the possibilities!
Aside from the specification documents being eye-wateringly painful to decipher, and the design committee resulting in something that's so utterly obtuse to use that the devil himself may have had a hand in the process...
They forgot one tiny little thing: most units until very recently were deployed as a discrete component on the SPI bus, with all the commands & secrets passing back and forth in plaintext with no authentication or encryption.
Unfortunately that rendered them unfit for purpose for a huge percentage of the use cases which were championed, it's almost as stupid as Windows uploading your BitLocker keys to Microsoft for 'safe keeping' - it's almost as if some devious three letter agency had influenced the decisions to fundamentally weaken cryptography for everybody.
- franky47 4y agoEven if we assume a proper protocol is in place (secrets remain in the HSM which is doing secure computation), the problem of trusting the hardware remains: how do we know a three letter agency isn't tampering with the HSM hardware assembly process to influence the keys being fused into it?
- quesomaster9000 4y agoI don't necessarily care about the lettered agencies tampering with or backdooring hardware during the manufacturing process because there's nothing I can do about it, but when the best encryption manufacturers have to offer can be defeated by an average CS student with a <$1000 logic analyzer it shows a concerning defect in the process. This line of thinking makes me want to give up, buy a cottage in the woods, adopt 20 cats, burn all my computers and start trading artisanal pottery at the local farmers market.