Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

There are two potential attack scenarios, assuming some attacker A has full control of the PC connected to the Yubikey:

1. A somehow convinces the remote party that the actual public key is X' instead of X. Ciphertext comes in, attacker decrypts it. Done.

2. A intercepts ciphertext, feeds it to Yubikey for decryption, and gets the resulting plaintext over USB (or whatever). Note: this is assuming that the Yubikey doesn't have encrypted filesystem support or similar.

Combining 1&2, A can use the Yubikey as an oracle to perform unlimited authentications, signing, and decryptions.

The only advantage provided by a Yubikey is that your keys cannot be remotely exfiltrated. Physical attacks on the hardware are still possible though.

View on HN

I don't understand what option one has to do with any of this, if you can switch keys there's nothing any amount of extra hardware can do. In that case, just use the key you switched to.

It is true that hardware tokens without an integrated external I/O (not through the PC it is plugged into) are vulnerable to this type of attack during initial key setup. Maybe they should support using the indicator LED to morse code thumbprints or something, but if you can't trust I/O to the device during setup you're going to have a bad time. I will quote my original caveat here:

> Just plug it into a computer with a CPU you do trust first to get the official public key(s) for future verifications!

Your second point seems to be that the plaintext has to be exposed (either going in or coming out) at the USB/hardware interface level, which makes more sense to discuss. The sales page promises the following, but I didn't quickly find any details on how it works:

https://www.yubico.com/products/yubihsm/

Secure session between HSM and application

The integrity and privacy of commands and data in transit between the HSM and applications are protected using a mutually authenticated, integrity and confidentiality protected tunnel.

> I don't understand what option one has to do with any of this, if you can switch keys there's nothing any amount of extra hardware can do. In that case, just use the key you switched to.

Take TLS/HTTPS as an example. The underlying assumption is that your browser's and/or OS certificate store are trusted. If an attacker compromises your machine and adds a new certificate to that "trusted" store, all secure communication is broken. That is the inherent weakness of public-key crypto.

Back to the Yubikey scenario. Let's say a remote server R wants to talk to the Yubikey Y on your PC. Y initially generates a key pair and then (somehow) securely delivers the public key to the remote server R. Clearly, whenever R sends something to Y, an attacker wouldn't be able to decrypt the message unless it has the private key which is securely stored on the HSM.

Scenario (1) above was looking at the case of an attacker who somehow "tricks" R into updating/replacing/revoking the original public key and inserting his own key into the remote key database. If successful, the attacker could then intercept all inbound communication from the remote server and decrypt it.

> The sales page promises the following, but I didn't quickly find any details on how it works:

It looks like marketing speak to me honestly. If the computer/server the Yubikey is talking to is compromised, there really is nothing stopping an attacker from using the Yubikey to perform arbitrary encryptions and decryptions.

Are we in agreement that no HSM can completely protect against scenario 1? (If I can't verify the key [varying degrees of "hard" when connecting across the internet], it can be replaced.)

[edited] That is why I don't see this as relevant, it is outside the threat model any HSM attempts to protect against. More mitigation is possible than the YubiHSM provides, using a display/inputs on the HSM itself to verify keys and choose/confirm operations.

I appreciate your patience in carefully explaining your perspective, and this issue is definitely something to keep in mind in general.

> That is why I don't see why this could possibly be relevant, it is outside the threat model the HSM attempts to protect against.

I agree completely. It's just something to keep in mind.

We didn't use Yubikeys, but I've used a hardware module to go from encrypted request -> signed plaintext request. A compromised CPU has no way to emit a new signed request, so it can't forge a a request + computation, only fail to compute or emit an invalid proof object.

I don't know about Yubikeys, but if they can sign their emitted plaintext, they could be used to similar effect.

I don't follow. Firstly, where is the encrypted request coming from? And more importantly, why would the CPU need to forge a request when it can just send an arbitrary plaintext to the HSM for signing (i.e., using the HSM as a signing oracle)?

How does it get arbitrary requests signed?

The module only supported two interfaces:

1. Network -> Buffer, where it takes a packet with a particular structure and encrypted data and emits a signed plaintext.

2. Buffer -> Network, where it takes a request, result, and proof object and sends them out after signing and encrypting.

We were using it to front solvers that did a lot of work to solve constraints and emitted a proof object, so clients would send us requests (not our problem how they generate them) and then we had to show we did the right thing. The CPU didn't know either key, so it could either:

1. Compute the right thing, have results signed.

2. Compute something that doesn't match the signed request; have its faulty proof signed and returned. (Detected by the consumer when they verify.)

3. Fail to compute.

So this was guarding the case where a CPU was compromised and could possibly emit faulty (or malicious) results.

The point is that HSMs can allow for securing a computation chain if you can securely sign the root, even against compromised CPUs.

The technical details need to be answered by someone with hands-on experience, but the YubiHSM1 manual documents use of AEAD (RFC 3610: Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data), and references AEAD/client keys required for two modes of operation (HSM/WSAPI). Also: truckloads of reminders to never re-use a nonce in AES-CCM.

Most interactions with remote servers involve higher-level crypto primitives, but if a secure client has these keys it should be possible to interact securely with a remote YubiHSM (assuming secure initial setup, keys must remain secure, etc.).

The only advantage of the Yubikey is absolutely massive though. It means not having to worry about revocating private keys or dealing with recurring forgeries after a security breach.

As long as you mitigate the current exploit, you've stopped any forgeries from that point forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com