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Decorative Cryptography
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Foxboron 10mo ago[flagged]
- usefulposter 10mo agoNever stopped. But the last time it came up, it was officially sanctioned, so... :/ At least we got acknowledgement and not gaslighting this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156003 This was funny though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249197
- cinntaile 10mo agoIt's just a link to a blogpost, like all the other links on HN. None are treated any special way. Why would content that was on lobsters first be treated differently.
- aspenmayer 10mo agoThe mismatch seems to stem from the fact that generated comments are against HN guidelines, but automated posts are tolerated by mods, which seems somewhat reasonable on its face, but has failure modes when OPs' own posts, even when they post first, are scooped by bots.
- Foxboron 10mo agoThe issue is that it also becomes easy to game. I've abused the fact that bots repost lobste.rs by timing my post submissions, I could have had this front-page post as I posted this to lobste.rs originally. This makes the HN front-page less of an organic thing, and this is an implicit vote ring behavior few people have access to. It also makes people interested in lobste.rs for this behavior, which our community is not interested inn.
- bjackman 10mo agoThe phrase "threat model gerrymandering" is fantastic, is fantastic, I will be using that a lot I think.
- ahoka 10mo agoDefinitely the word of the day for me.
- ragebol 10mo agoI expected something about cryptography keys hidden in a decoration somewhere (kinda like LoTR Gate of Moria style), article was not quite what I expected. Although it is in a sense
- nine_k 10mo agoThe Gate of Moria inscription was plaintext. The first person to not try to interpret it as a riddle solved it.
- tucnak 10mo agoI find it surprising that IBM POWER9 had key imprints in 2017 (sic!!) and it's still nowhere to be found on contemporary CPU's...
- fc417fc802 10mo agoPOWER9 had quite a few neat things going on. I think it's unfortunate that it never became mainstream. The switch to closed source firmware in Power10 is also a downer.
- mmoustafa 10mo ago> All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends. This reminds of how Apple iMessage is E2E encrypted, but Apple runs on-device content detection that pings their servers, which you can't possibly even think of disabling. [1][2] [1] https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/ https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n... [2] Investigation in Beeper/PyPush discord for iMessage spam blocking
- saagarjha 10mo agoWhat’s the concern here? The blog post you linked does not really support its claims with evidence.
- perching_aix 10mo agoThey're actually two separate claims, one of which the blogpost does support. The other one is seemingly ought to be supported by some conversations on a Discord server. The concern is obvious though, not sure what's unclear about that: it's a bit pointless to have E2EE, if the adversary has full access to one of the ends anyways.
- xvector 10mo ago[1] is supposedly debunked: https://pawisoon.medium.com/debunked-the-truth-about-mediaanalysisd-and-apples-access-to-your-local-photos-on-macos-a42215e713d1 https://pawisoon.medium.com/debunked-the-truth-about-mediaan... > the network traffic sent and received by mediaanalysisd was found to be empty and appears to be a bug. I say "supposedly debunked" because empty traffic doesn't mean there's nothing going on. It could just be a file deemed safe. But then the author said: > The network call that raised concerns is a bug. Apple has since released macOS 13.2, which has fixed this issue, and the process no longer makes calls to Apple servers
- jll29 10mo agoGiven with yesterday's article on here about the issues of PGP, it looks like all software encryption short of a one-time pad are decorative. I like the idea of a key part of the the CPU (comment below); does anyone know why Intel/ARM/AMD have not picked up this IBM feature?
- dist-epoch 10mo agoWhat do you mean exactly? Both AMD/Intel have signed firmware, and both support hardware attestation, where they sign what they see with an AMD/Intel key and you can later check that signature. This is the basis of confidential VMs, where not even the machine physical owner can tamper with the VM in an undetectable way.
- evan_a_a 10mo agoI have bad news on that front. https://tee.fail/ https://tee.fail/
- lxgr 10mo agoYes, trusted computing is empirically hard, but I haven't heard solid arguments either way on whether it's actually infeasible.
- fc417fc802 10mo ago> While the data itself is encrypted, notice how the values written by the first and third operation are the same. The fact that Intel and AMD both went with ECB leaves me with mild disbelief. I realize wrangling IVs in that scenario is difficult but that's hardly an excuse to release a product that they knew full well was fundamentally broken. The insecurity of ECB for this sort of task has been common knowledge for at least 2 decades.
- dist-epoch 10mo agoI don't think that's the issue. It seems it's the same memory address location, so an address/location based IV would have the same problem. You need a sequence number to solve this, but they have no place where to store it.
- dist-epoch 10mo ago> Active physical interposer adversaries are a very real part of legitimate threat models. You need an integrated root-of-trust in your CPU in order to solve these. It's been almost 10 years since Microsoft, based on their Xbox experience, started saying "stop using discrete TPMs over the bus, they are impossible to secure, we need the TPM embedded in the CPU itself"
- RobotToaster 10mo agoThat's assuming you trust the CPU vendor not to have their own interposer.
- dist-epoch 10mo agoIf you don't trust the CPU vendor in your machine you have bigger problems.
- RobotToaster 10mo agoGiven that the Intel ME and AMD PSP are both backdoors, we all have problems.
- commandersaki 10mo agoWho has the keys to this backdoor? [for the curious]
- immibis 10mo agoAt a minimum, Intel and AMD.
- commandersaki 10mo agoWhat kind of keys are they? In that same regard, Apple holds the keys to sign software for secure enclaves on iDevices and Macs, does that make them backdoored, since they can control execution on the firmware that protects everyone's authentication data and secrets?
- maximgeorge 10mo ago[dead]
- maccard 10mo ago> All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends. This is a great quote.
- badcryptobitch 10mo ago> Unexplainable security features are just marketing materials. I feel this way about a lot of hardware-based security solutions like TPMs, and TEEs. These are actually useful solutions that can help solve problems that we have (as evidenced by this article) but unfortunately, these solutions tend to be poorly publicly documented. As a result, we rely on academics to do the work for us in order to learn how to better contextualize these solutions.
- Muromec 10mo agoI was dealing with a good old anti-tampering userspace library last week. They did everything right. The process detects that it's traced (by asking the kernel nicely) and shuts down. So I patched the kernel and now I can connect with and poke around gdb. I can't put a software breakpoint because the process computes checksum of it's memory and jumps through a table index computed from a hash, so I had to put the hardware read watchpoint on modified memory location, record who reads it and patch the jump index to the right one. Of course, there is another function that checksums the memory and runs the process into sigsegv, it has tons of obfuscated confusing stuff, so I have to patch it with 'lol return 0'. And then I can finally use frida to disable ssl pinning to mitmproxy it. It all took a week to bypass all the levels of obfuscation, find the actual thing I was looking for and extract it. Can't imagine how much time the people at $securitycompanyname spent on adding all those levels of obfuscation and anti-debug. More than a week for sure. What was it doing? A custom HOTP. It wasn't any better on actual secure boots 20 years ago where bootloader checksummed the whole firmware before transferring control, because bootloader itself was in ROM and of course it had subtle logical bugs and you only need to find one and bootloader is there in ROM bugged forever.
- DenisM 10mo agoHow was your experience with Xbox? I heard it was rather watertight?
- Muromec 10mo agoWhy would I ever pay for anything microsoft made?
- nine_k 10mo agoHow many more amateur attempts did these layers thwart? Did its creators collect enough revenue before the crack was produced? I suppose uncrackable software, in the sense of e.g. license protection, cannot exist. Software is completely beholden to hardware, and known hardware can be arbitrarily emulated, and there's nowhere to hide any tamper-resistant secret bits. Only in a combination with locked-down, uncrackable hardware can properly designed software without critical bugs remain uncrackable; see stuff like yubikeys. Similarly, communication can remain uncrackable as long as the secret bits (like a private key) remain secret.
- cryptonector 10mo ago> You need an integrated root-of-trust in your CPU in order to solve these. Yes, quite. The BIOS/UEFI absolutely needs to store a public key of a primary key on the TPM, probably the EKpub itself for simplicity. Without that you will be vulnerable to an MITM attack, at least early in boot, and since the MITM could fool you about the root of trust for later, as long as the MITM can commit to always being there you cannot detect the attack.