----- Forwarded message from ianG <[email protected]> ----- Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 11:31:39 +0100 From: ianG <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: Jerry Leichter <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Cryptography] You can't trust any of your hardware Message-ID: <[email protected]> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0
On 4/08/2014 03:28 am, Jerry Leichter wrote: > On Aug 2, 2014, at 8:54 PM, Nemo <[email protected]> wrote: >>> How many USB devices have ever been patched after sale? ... > There are few sharp lines here, but there is a very broad, very heavily > populated, set of "USB devices" that we commonly look at as having fixed > functions based on code that will never be changed. USB memory sticks are > extremely cheap and produced in the hundreds of millions. No one thinks of > them as active devices. And yet ... they are. They contain significant > processing power running non-trivial code - and that code can be replaced. > That's the big message here. Yes, obvious in retrospect - but how much have > *you* thought about defenses against legitimate memory sticks from major > manufactures that have had their standard firmware replaced with attack code? In CAcert we used the USB memory sticks for sneaker-packets in key-signing ceremonys, and for later escrow. We use 2 for each. They are to be purchased at a random retail street store on the day. Those not escrowed are destroyed afterwards. We might need to rethink the approach, perhaps with open source designs? iang _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message -----
