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Comment by vgt | Hacker News Reader

It's a sign of changing times indeed, but for the consumer's benefit.

It is absolutely in Google's best interests to externalize security for its customers as a differentiator of Google Cloud. The parent article itself links to the white paper that outlines how this is done for Google Cloud.

I understand how one may consider this a "closed ecosystem" from one perspective. However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it. When the barrier to entry is lowered and access is commoditized, customer wins.

(work at Google cloud)

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I've worked on both sides of the fence. My take on it is that the cloud is raising the security bar in many dimensions, but lowering it in otheres. Frankly, for-profit surveillance (and government conspirators) is at the top of my list of security concerns.

The good news is that the "evil" mega corps aren't so evil, and generally contribute back.

Also, the bar for custom hardware is dropping, and the recent moore's law stall means a good board design can live for 3-6 years instead of 1-2. In turn, this means that niche operating systems like BSD and opensource Solaris have increasingly stable hardware targets.

Taken together, this is great news.

> However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it.

I don't expect startups or mom-and-pop's to build internal clouds. I do expect medium to large companies to do so. The current market turns innovations such as these into competitive advantages of Google, instead of directly exposing the innovation to the market and allowing incorporation of its advantage into anyone's product. It's a less liquid market. Either you buy all of Google's solution as a package, or you buy none. You can't pick, sort and mash a solution of your own from disparate parts.

Note that Google here is just an example. All companies of similar size in IT are doing the same, and strategically it is the correct option (for them). I'm just stating that the overall result is sub-optimal through a collusion of disparate factors.

> and strategically it is the correct option (for them).

I agree. Consider what's at stake for them. I can't even begin to wrap my head around how bad that would be if an entire server farm got rooted. At least defending a bank you know what the attacker's endgame is: steal money/SSN's. If a server farm were hacked, you'd see identity theft, blackmail, massive customer (and e-commerce) downtime, malware distribution, ddos/large botnets, market manipulation (if you started spreading false news about a particular company, at scale, on social media), perhaps brute-force RSA/SSL cracking. If those guys got hacked, it could be an absolute shitstorm. So I dont blame them at all for creating their own TPM or whatever.

> I understand how one may consider this a "closed ecosystem" from one perspective. However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it. When the barrier to entry is lowered and access is commoditized, customer wins.

I don't understand why the customer can't get these benefits AND the ecosystem be open as well.

Pressure from governments to not supply consumers with hardware that is resistant to surveillance is one reason.

AFAIK, the consumer systems that are most resistant to physical attack (and that lack spooky things like Intel's system management CPU) are game consoles. The hardening is a requirement for anti-piracy and anti-cheating, and in newer generations of consoles it's been quite successful. Recent iPhones are a distant second in terms of security architecture.

I would agree with you if they cannot be updated via an internet connection.

> Recent iPhones are a distant second in terms of security architecture.

Source? Apple does some pretty sophisticated stuff around hardware security mechanisms and software correctness.

(I genuinely want a technical description of the mechanisms consoles use these days so I can read it -- not trying to start an argument...)

I don't have any details but without a exploit a game console will never run a single line of code that isn't signed. It makes the attack surface rather smaller than an iPhone.

Without an exploit, how does one run unsigned code on an iPhone, exactly?

Like so: https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-sideload-apps-on-iphone-an...

You're still signing the app when you side load it in that way.

You can't have an open ecosystem when part of the ecosystem is hundreds if not thousands of full-time security experts and 24x7 opsec analysts. It is an integrated software and operations system. The software alone doesn't get you anywhere.

> any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments,

Until a random cosmic ray triggers Google to revoke access for mom and pop.

There's tradeoffs, and most people don't discover them until the random cosmic ray hits the fan. And, to be fair, most Google customers probably never encounter a RCR event.

Let's be clear: The customer never wins when the product is closed. Google used to understand that: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

In realty, mom-and-pop don't need these security developments, because mom-and-pop have much less attack surface on a server running in their back room. The cloud necessitates it be possible to manage a server over the Internet, but for many situations that isn't necessary. And in many cases, the limited needs a mom-and-pop company has doesn't require their infrastructure be public facing on the Internet at all.

I'd argue the only reason one needs these "world-class security developments" is because Google itself is a world-class target. The sort of threats you're defending against would almost never be necessary for a smaller business with an on-premises solution to be concerned about.

Many small business internally need little more than a shared network drive, rudimentary user management, etc. And you'd be stunned how many businesses today still operate off a single AOL mail account.

Strongly disagree. Mom and pop businesses get owned all the time and close as a result (see Krebs On Security for cites). The economics of online attacks mean that even smallish targets are not obscure enough to be safe.

Disclosure: I work on security at Google.

People's Google accounts get owned all the time too. None of this excess security measures Google is talking about helps if you have bad security practices or your password is 123456.

Google's security measures here largely are a result of a security problem Google created in the first place. That isn't unusual, mind you. Web design is much the same way. We create new problems via added complexity, then have to solve them.

The whole threat model that requires you put custom silicon in your servers just doesn't apply or matter to smaller parties.

Your comment extrem bad. If totally and utterly false that nothing google does helps against bad passwords. Google has some of the best 2Fa system pretty much compared to everybody else. They support TOTP, SMS and U2F.

Your comment is extremely bad, because we aren't talking about TOTP (an open standard), SMS (an open standard), or U2F (an open standard).

This article is about the custom security silicon in Google servers, and Google Cloud employees selling the false concept that this is a must-have for anyone but themselves. This has nothing to do with 2FA, and 2FA, in case you're curious, works everywhere not powered by Google Cloud too.

Do not attack people when you do not know the topic of the conversation you are participating in.

You are really good at trolling.

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