6 ms·

Two-way isolation seems like it'd only be useful for DRM and Treacherous Computing.

nl 3y ago
This is such a bad take. I'd love the easy ability to run confidential computing loads with fine grained control over the data it gets access to. You can do this now on the desktop using SGX (etc) but on mobile it's really hard. As a specific example of this, it'd be great to be able to run Whisper continually and have strong, system level guarantees about what can read the data.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  I used to work at Google adjacent to this stuff and A) you wouldn't boot up a whole VM for this, on a phone, that'd be very wasteful B) there's much simpler ways to provide the same guarantee. So in general, just would avoid labeling the quality of other people's takes. You never know who is reading yours
  - somanytta 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - nl 3y ago
    I agree there are currently better ways of doing this (because as you mention the resource/protection trade off for this technology on this application is sub-optimal), but the context here is as an example on HN where the data privacy is obvious so I didn't have to write a whole paper explaining it.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      Its "not even wrong", if you had a million monkeys on a million typewriters with a million trillion millenia, still, none would come up with a paper long enough to explain how that'd help anything (ex. trivially, microphone)
      - nl 3y ago
        > trivially, microphone Qualcomm has trusted input for at least touch sensors into their trusted enclave (unsure about microphone input at this point). Look for "TUI" in https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets/documents/Payments-on-Enterprise-Devices.pdf https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...
        refulgentis 3y ago
        Yes
- zeusk 3y ago
  is it really? wasn't that the whole point of ARM TZ/SEP?
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Not really. ARM TZ has been repeatedly blown open, in part because it’s not really a separate core or virtualized workload, but a different “mode of operation” that the standard CPU cores switch into temporarily. Basically going back-and-forth between TZ and your OS if I understand correctly. Turns out that’s a side-channel attack nightmare.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    This is supposed to be a replacement to TrustZone applets.
  - nl 3y ago
    Trusted computing can be used for DRM. I'm much more interested in it as a privacy enhancing technology: the fact that you can have strong guarantees about what can be done with data in the enclave is useful for a lot of applications where you have sensitive data. (Putting aside the fact for the moment that most - if not all - trusted computing platforms have some security vulnerabilities. Obviously this is bad, but doesn't preclude their utility)
- saagarjha 3y ago
  The threat model you have in your head seems to imply that you don't trust your OS to not peek into what Whisper is doing? There are very few workloads that need or can operate under that model.
  - somanytta 3y ago
    It's not really a matter of need, more a matter of good hygiene. Do you trust any modern OS not to accidently include sensitive information when it generates a crash report for an app and sends it off the some remote server in the background? Isolation is a useful tool. In an ideal world it can be done perfectly at the OS level, but we don't live in that world.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      I agree that being able to isolate things that have different security domains is a useful tool. That said, I am not really seeing how pKVM provides useful primitives for much other than DRM, which has historically been the primary usecase for trusted execution that isolated VMs seem to provide.
      - somanytta 3y ago
        Consider that, I want to be able to use a regular android OS, but I don't completely trust it, either its purposely malicious or just accidently going to leak info. So isolation is good in this case, its much easier to audit the mechanism of isolation rather than the whole OS. The problem with DRM and "trusted computing" part is that it's under someone else's control, some central authority etc. From my reading of the docs on this, this is not the case with pVM, from https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/security https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/security > Data is tied to instances of a pVM, and secure boot ensures that access to an instance’s data can be controlled > When a device is unlocked with fastboot oem unlock, user data is wiped. > Once unlocked, the owner of the device is free to reflash partitions that are usually protected by verified boot, including partitions containing the pKVM implementation. Therefore, pKVM on an unlocked device won't be trusted to uphold the security model. So my reading of this is that that it is under the users control, as long as they have the ability to unlock the bootloader, and reflash the device with their own images. I'd love someone who is more knowledgeable to weigh in, but this tech, to me, doesn't seem that close to TPM/DRM type chips where there is no possibility of user control.
- fuomag9 3y ago
  Btw SGX has been removed from 11th gen desktop CPUs and onwards https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chips-wont-play-blu-ray-disks-due-to-sgx-deprecation/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chi...
kiririn 3y ago
Yep, you need only look at the number of server providers offering confidential computing (pretty much only the big 3) and the premium they charge for it (10x, except AWS “trust me bro” Nitro) Confidential computing is cool and useful when you’re the one controlling the VM, but scary when you’re the one blindly running it on your hardware Hopefully this gets (publicly!) backdoored like SEV, SGX, etc
- somanytta 3y ago
  > Confidential computing is cool and useful when you’re the one controlling the VM, but scary when you’re the one blindly running it on your hardware Important point. > Hopefully this gets (publicly!) backdoored like SEV, SGX, etc From my reading this doesn't need to be backdoored, if you have the ability to unlock the bootloader, you are not reliant on googles root of trust to be able to use this feature, you can go ahead and become your own "vendor", by signing your own images, or use your choice of vendor, then relock the bootloader and have the same security guarantees. I'll admit this only from a cursory glance over the documentation and a vague understanding, happy to be corrected, but seems a lot of the arguments in this thread are about your first point, who has control over the OS. I'll also add that the EU is being quite proactive in people having control over their own device, and who is their 'choice of vendor' so while I understand concerns people bring up, I'm a bit more optimistic that it can be a more useful tool than not.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wlesieutre 3y ago
Maybe banking apps would let you run them on rooted phones if they were in an isolated VM
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Every app will want to run in isolated VMs and rooting will mean nothing. It's like SafetyNet today, you can't run a good amount of apps on unapproved platforms already, even apps that don't handle confidential data.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    In an ideal world, you could opt-out of isolation without giving the code in the container a way to know. You wouldn't want to opt-out your banking TAN generator just like you wouldn't want to put the password in your email footer, but a Facebook client would likely be a popular target (despite the hypothetical risk of an attacker destroying your reputation by posting in your name).
- treyd 3y ago
  This nonsense means I just use them in the browser. There is no functionality the apps would provide me that makes it worth fighting with their superstitious nonsense.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    Some banks already require you to install and use apps to approve of transactions made outside of the app. When I traveled, this is how I was able to spend money without having to call my bank every time I tried to use my card in person.
    - treyd 3y ago
      What are you supposed to do if you don't have a smartphone? My bank simply texts me if there's suspicious purposes and you reply "YES".
    - 3y ago
candiddevmike 3y ago
See for example the Xbox, where everything runs as a VM.
jeroenhd 3y ago
This seems like an excellent tool for digital ID cards, banks, government authentication apps, maybe 2FA apps, cryptocurrency wallets, you name it. Anything that's more important than a calculator. DRM and remote attestation already use a separate secure environment, so I don't see what would change by adding virtualisation.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Websites will require digital ID just to use them, along with remote attestation. They will also be able to ban or block you in an actually effective and comprehensive way. There will be a chilling effect because people won't want to upset their Google/Microsoft/Apple/Meta etc overlords by saying or doing the wrong thing, and then get locked out of services they need to exist in society, do their job, spend money, etc.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Digital ID exists and is widely used, yet I only need to use my digital ID to authenticate with government services. Remote attestation is the norm for many types of apps already yet I can use my bank app on my rooted phone just fine, or use my phone to authenticate with my government's SSO system. I'm no fan of the modern dependence on Play Services or Google's attempts to kill adblockers through remote attestation, but none of these technologies are inherently bad. Business devices authenticating to business websites should allow remote attestation to verify that their hardware has not been tempered with just as an extra security measure. Maybe your government is more evil or incompetent than mine, but bad governments aren't going to he limited by technological concepts like these.
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      I'm not worried about the government, I'm more worried about inscrutable decisions made by companies like Google, where their automated systems decide that you're an anomaly, and thus malicious, and choose to ban you. Instead of just losing your account, you (or at least both your machine and your digital ID) are banned for good. This already happens with phones, where the entire device gets banned by apps for good, adding a layer of digital ID on top of it worsens the consequences of such decisions by platform owners against users. > Remote attestation is the norm for many types of apps already yet I can use my bank app on my rooted phone just fine, Many people can't on their rooted phones, and this cat-and-mouse game will eventually be won by the parties with million/billions to throw at it.

nl 3y ago

This is such a bad take. I'd love the easy ability to run confidential computing loads with fine grained control over the data it gets access to. You can do this now on the desktop using SGX (etc) but on mobile it's really hard. As a specific example of this, it'd be great to be able to run Whisper continually and have strong, system level guarantees about what can read the data.

refulgentis 3y ago
I used to work at Google adjacent to this stuff and A) you wouldn't boot up a whole VM for this, on a phone, that'd be very wasteful B) there's much simpler ways to provide the same guarantee. So in general, just would avoid labeling the quality of other people's takes. You never know who is reading yours
- somanytta 3y ago
  [flagged]
- nl 3y ago
  I agree there are currently better ways of doing this (because as you mention the resource/protection trade off for this technology on this application is sub-optimal), but the context here is as an example on HN where the data privacy is obvious so I didn't have to write a whole paper explaining it.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Its "not even wrong", if you had a million monkeys on a million typewriters with a million trillion millenia, still, none would come up with a paper long enough to explain how that'd help anything (ex. trivially, microphone)
    - nl 3y ago
      > trivially, microphone Qualcomm has trusted input for at least touch sensors into their trusted enclave (unsure about microphone input at this point). Look for "TUI" in https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets/documents/Payments-on-Enterprise-Devices.pdf https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        Yes
zeusk 3y ago
is it really? wasn't that the whole point of ARM TZ/SEP?
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Not really. ARM TZ has been repeatedly blown open, in part because it’s not really a separate core or virtualized workload, but a different “mode of operation” that the standard CPU cores switch into temporarily. Basically going back-and-forth between TZ and your OS if I understand correctly. Turns out that’s a side-channel attack nightmare.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  This is supposed to be a replacement to TrustZone applets.
- nl 3y ago
  Trusted computing can be used for DRM. I'm much more interested in it as a privacy enhancing technology: the fact that you can have strong guarantees about what can be done with data in the enclave is useful for a lot of applications where you have sensitive data. (Putting aside the fact for the moment that most - if not all - trusted computing platforms have some security vulnerabilities. Obviously this is bad, but doesn't preclude their utility)
saagarjha 3y ago
The threat model you have in your head seems to imply that you don't trust your OS to not peek into what Whisper is doing? There are very few workloads that need or can operate under that model.
- somanytta 3y ago
  It's not really a matter of need, more a matter of good hygiene. Do you trust any modern OS not to accidently include sensitive information when it generates a crash report for an app and sends it off the some remote server in the background? Isolation is a useful tool. In an ideal world it can be done perfectly at the OS level, but we don't live in that world.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    I agree that being able to isolate things that have different security domains is a useful tool. That said, I am not really seeing how pKVM provides useful primitives for much other than DRM, which has historically been the primary usecase for trusted execution that isolated VMs seem to provide.
    - somanytta 3y ago
      Consider that, I want to be able to use a regular android OS, but I don't completely trust it, either its purposely malicious or just accidently going to leak info. So isolation is good in this case, its much easier to audit the mechanism of isolation rather than the whole OS. The problem with DRM and "trusted computing" part is that it's under someone else's control, some central authority etc. From my reading of the docs on this, this is not the case with pVM, from https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/security https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/security > Data is tied to instances of a pVM, and secure boot ensures that access to an instance’s data can be controlled > When a device is unlocked with fastboot oem unlock, user data is wiped. > Once unlocked, the owner of the device is free to reflash partitions that are usually protected by verified boot, including partitions containing the pKVM implementation. Therefore, pKVM on an unlocked device won't be trusted to uphold the security model. So my reading of this is that that it is under the users control, as long as they have the ability to unlock the bootloader, and reflash the device with their own images. I'd love someone who is more knowledgeable to weigh in, but this tech, to me, doesn't seem that close to TPM/DRM type chips where there is no possibility of user control.
fuomag9 3y ago
Btw SGX has been removed from 11th gen desktop CPUs and onwards https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chips-wont-play-blu-ray-disks-due-to-sgx-deprecation/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chi...

kiririn 3y ago

Yep, you need only look at the number of server providers offering confidential computing (pretty much only the big 3) and the premium they charge for it (10x, except AWS “trust me bro” Nitro) Confidential computing is cool and useful when you’re the one controlling the VM, but scary when you’re the one blindly running it on your hardware Hopefully this gets (publicly!) backdoored like SEV, SGX, etc

somanytta 3y ago
> Confidential computing is cool and useful when you’re the one controlling the VM, but scary when you’re the one blindly running it on your hardware Important point. > Hopefully this gets (publicly!) backdoored like SEV, SGX, etc From my reading this doesn't need to be backdoored, if you have the ability to unlock the bootloader, you are not reliant on googles root of trust to be able to use this feature, you can go ahead and become your own "vendor", by signing your own images, or use your choice of vendor, then relock the bootloader and have the same security guarantees. I'll admit this only from a cursory glance over the documentation and a vague understanding, happy to be corrected, but seems a lot of the arguments in this thread are about your first point, who has control over the OS. I'll also add that the EU is being quite proactive in people having control over their own device, and who is their 'choice of vendor' so while I understand concerns people bring up, I'm a bit more optimistic that it can be a more useful tool than not.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wlesieutre 3y ago

Maybe banking apps would let you run them on rooted phones if they were in an isolated VM

heavyset_go 3y ago
Every app will want to run in isolated VMs and rooting will mean nothing. It's like SafetyNet today, you can't run a good amount of apps on unapproved platforms already, even apps that don't handle confidential data.
- usrusr 3y ago
  In an ideal world, you could opt-out of isolation without giving the code in the container a way to know. You wouldn't want to opt-out your banking TAN generator just like you wouldn't want to put the password in your email footer, but a Facebook client would likely be a popular target (despite the hypothetical risk of an attacker destroying your reputation by posting in your name).
treyd 3y ago
This nonsense means I just use them in the browser. There is no functionality the apps would provide me that makes it worth fighting with their superstitious nonsense.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Some banks already require you to install and use apps to approve of transactions made outside of the app. When I traveled, this is how I was able to spend money without having to call my bank every time I tried to use my card in person.
  - treyd 3y ago
    What are you supposed to do if you don't have a smartphone? My bank simply texts me if there's suspicious purposes and you reply "YES".
  - 3y ago

candiddevmike 3y ago

See for example the Xbox, where everything runs as a VM.

jeroenhd 3y ago

This seems like an excellent tool for digital ID cards, banks, government authentication apps, maybe 2FA apps, cryptocurrency wallets, you name it. Anything that's more important than a calculator. DRM and remote attestation already use a separate secure environment, so I don't see what would change by adding virtualisation.

heavyset_go 3y ago
Websites will require digital ID just to use them, along with remote attestation. They will also be able to ban or block you in an actually effective and comprehensive way. There will be a chilling effect because people won't want to upset their Google/Microsoft/Apple/Meta etc overlords by saying or doing the wrong thing, and then get locked out of services they need to exist in society, do their job, spend money, etc.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Digital ID exists and is widely used, yet I only need to use my digital ID to authenticate with government services. Remote attestation is the norm for many types of apps already yet I can use my bank app on my rooted phone just fine, or use my phone to authenticate with my government's SSO system. I'm no fan of the modern dependence on Play Services or Google's attempts to kill adblockers through remote attestation, but none of these technologies are inherently bad. Business devices authenticating to business websites should allow remote attestation to verify that their hardware has not been tempered with just as an extra security measure. Maybe your government is more evil or incompetent than mine, but bad governments aren't going to he limited by technological concepts like these.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    I'm not worried about the government, I'm more worried about inscrutable decisions made by companies like Google, where their automated systems decide that you're an anomaly, and thus malicious, and choose to ban you. Instead of just losing your account, you (or at least both your machine and your digital ID) are banned for good. This already happens with phones, where the entire device gets banned by apps for good, adding a layer of digital ID on top of it worsens the consequences of such decisions by platform owners against users. > Remote attestation is the norm for many types of apps already yet I can use my bank app on my rooted phone just fine, Many people can't on their rooted phones, and this cat-and-mouse game will eventually be won by the parties with million/billions to throw at it.