Warren Kumari <war...@kumari.net> writes: >Major HSM vulnerabilities impact banks, cloud providers, governments >https://www.zdnet.com/article/major-hsm-vulnerabilities-impact-banks-cloud-providers-governments/
>From TFA: The duo's research paper is currently available only in French, Devilishly clever! That way Thales and Gemalto can fix their HSMs while the non-French-speaking hackers have to wait for Black Hat to find out what the vulns are. Despite the inexplicable lack of being taught phrases like "couche de resine epoxy" while still learning everyday useful things like "le ballon tombe dans les fleurs", the gist of the paper is that running externally-updatable ancient unpatched Linux (an unstripped, unhardened 2.26 (!!!) kernel) with buggy PKCS #11 firmware on your HSM isn't a good idea. This isn't really an HSM, it's more an IoT device with a crypto accelerator attached. Once I read to the description of the configuration, my only surprise was that it took this long to get pwned. Not wanting to downplay the authors' achievement, but it's a hack of a generic, run-of-the-mill IoT device, just one that happens to be advertised as an HSM. It's also not surprising that you can attack the PKCS #11 API directly, as the authors correctly point out it's very complex and therefore has a very large attack surface. I'm sure many PKCS #11 client-app developers have inadvertently "attacked" their PKCS #11 implementation just by passing in incorrect parameters while developing code (I have, for several implementations). In addition, with what they're running as the firmware as an indicator, it's also not overly surprising that the crypto code itself is of, uhh, sub-par quality. Sorta confirms the comment I made in my book that "A great many security systems in use today are secure only because no-one's ever bothered attacking them". All in all a nice piece of work, and an interesting read. Peter. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@cryptech.is https://lists.cryptech.is/listinfo/tech
