Re: [Cryptography] What is Intel® Core™ vPro™ Technology Animation
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 9/22/2013 2:23 PM, Jerry Leichter wrote: On Sep 21, 2013, at 10:05 PM, d.nix wrote: Hah hah hah. Uh, reading between the lines, color me *skeptical* that this is really what it claims to be, given the current understanding of things... http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/enterprise-security/what-is-vpro-technology-video.html The question isn't whether it's what it claims to be. It is that. But is it's *more* than it claims to be. Yes, in my haste I neglected the only disclaimer bit; it is indeed a means by which the *rightful owner/administrator* might perform very useful tasks. The obvious crux of the biscuit is *who else* has access, and what can they do surreptitiously? If for example, the paper regarding manipulating the RNG circuit by alternate chip doping is valid, then an adversary with deep pockets and vast resources might well be able remotely target specific systems on demand. Possibly even air gapped ones if this function is controllable via a 3G signal as I have read elsewhere. Or perhaps just outright reroute and tap information prior to encryption, or subtly corrupt things in other ways such that processes fail or leak data. A universal on-demand STUXNET, if you will... Yes, idle unfounded speculation, I know... but still... these days the fear is that we're not paranoid enough. H. Maybe time to pull my old 1996 SGI R10K and R4400 boxes out of storage. For a few *very* dedicated and air gapped tasks they might be a small measure of worthwhile trouble. Regards, DN -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJSP4OfAAoJEDMbeBxcUNAeVmUH/3MRSd/QkH9J/fY4iezSX/ME 2AbXaRSJmyLhZPW/c+moH0aUYAIPUQQ3JmVt0InZWM06jrR0pO/I9GxIM9IUWYM7 /6u/NLUcdiDtJx+BLcyUdtqSpYErkWQH9qoWxunDtUUj988xxTgia1Q+yN0h+ZOg 6PJtXB8+fTAGSoRCkhuokitB/XGbMFgAxtIyq2CMVSr3v0fOGCItvEq2wVzw8+h1 o0ps90OE3RLnel6u4YNm5EFRWoDiwN45+u/wGdXHJlSUZrncX1o6NsGvSC/0Pl94 7CYF7qpeltMMzpgPrp0IeWrls/G89FdOnjD97nzcCQ480RZAfpYCNXOIBURXq+I= =SUzc -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] What is Intel® Core™ vPro™ Technology Animation
On Sep 21, 2013, at 10:05 PM, d.nix wrote: Hah hah hah. Uh, reading between the lines, color me *skeptical* that this is really what it claims to be, given the current understanding of things... http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/enterprise-security/what-is-vpro-technology-video.html The question isn't whether it's what it claims to be. It is that. But is it's *more* than it claims to be. There are a whole bunch of things in recent Intel chips to provide manageability and security. And there are cases where this is very valuable and necessary - e.g., if you have a large cluster or processors, it's good to be able to remotely configure them no matter what state they are in. There are many similar examples. If it's *your* hardware, *your* ability to control it, in detail, is a good thing. (Yes, if you've been lent the hardware by your employer, it's the *employer* who's the owner, not you, and it's the *employer* who can do what he likes. This has always been the case to a large degree. If it makes you uncomfortable - buy your own machine, don't use your work machine for non-work things.) The *theory* is that the owner can enable or disable these features, and has the keys to access them if enabled. What we don't know is whether anyone else has a back-door key. The phrase I always use to describe such situations is if there's a mode, there's a failure mode. Such technology could have been present in previous generations of chips, completely invisibly - but it would have required significant effort on Intel's part with no real payback. But once Intel is adding this stuff anyway ... well, it's only a small effort to provide a special additional back door access. -- Jerry ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] What is Intel® Core™ vPro™ Technology Animation
On Sep 22, 2013, at 7:56 PM, d.nix wrote: ...If for example, the paper regarding manipulating the RNG circuit by alternate chip doping is valid, then an adversary with deep pockets and vast resources might well be able remotely target specific systems on demand. Possibly even air gapped ones if this function is controllable via a 3G signal as I have read elsewhere. Or perhaps just outright reroute and tap information prior to encryption, or subtly corrupt things in other ways such that processes fail or leak data You started off concerned about misuse of a remote override function that Intel deliberately puts on the chips - a valid concern - but now have wandered off into arbitrary chip modifications. Those, too, are perhaps valid concerns - but they've been concerns for many years. Nothing new here, except that the deeper we look, the more ways we find to hide attacks within the hardware. That said, the doping paper, if I understood the suggestion correctly, discussed a way to modify individual chips, not whole runs of them. (Presumably you could modify whole runs by spiking the production process, but that would be difficult to hide: Chip manufacturing is by its nature a very tightly controlled process, and an extra step isn't something that people would miss. It would probably even show up in the very tightly watched yield statistics: The extra step would delay wafers on the line, which would cause the yield to drop. The beauty of the doping attack is that it's undetectable - at least right now; for every attack, a defense; for every defense, an attack. But exactly how one might make the *implementation* of the attack undetectable isn't at all clear.) H. Maybe time to pull my old 1996 SGI R10K and R4400 boxes out of storage. For a few *very* dedicated and air gapped tasks they might be a small measure of worthwhile trouble. You'll be amazed at how slow they now seem Still, it raises the question: If you can't trust your microprocessor chips, what do you do? One possible answer: Build yourself a processor out of MSI chips. We used to do that, not so long ago, and got respectable performance (if not, perhaps, on anything like today's scale). An MSI chip doesn't have enough intrinsic computation to provide much of a hook for an attack. Oh, sure, the hardware could be spiked - but to do *what*? Any given type of MSI chip could go into many different points of many different circuit topologies, and won't see enough of the data to do much anyway. There may be some interface issues: This stuff might not be fast enough to deal with modern memory chips. (How would you attack a memory chip? Certainly possible if you're make a targeted attack - you can slip in a small processor in the design to do all kinds of nasty things. But commercial of the shelf memory chips are built right up to the edge of what we can make, so you can't change a ll that much.) Some stuff is probably just impossible with this level of technology. I doubt you can build a Gig-E Ethernet interface without large-scale integration. You can certainly do the original 10 Mb/sec - after all, people did! I have no idea if you could get to 100 Mb/sec. Do people still make bit-slice chips? Are they at a low-enough level to not be a plausible attack vector? You could certainly build a respectable mail server this way - though it's probably not doing 2048-bit RSA at a usable speed. We've been talking about crypto (math) and coding (software). Frankly, I, personally, have no need to worry about someone attacking my hardware, and that's probably true of most people. But it's *not* true of everyone. So thinking about how to build harder to attack hardware is probably worth the effort. -- Jerry ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
