Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>You are deluding yourself if you think cryptography can be the solution to an attacker with access to the physical machine.

Of course it can be part of a solution. Responses like yours, which display zero consideration of threat scenarios, time/info/resource costs, or any potential improvements are somewhat tiresome these days.

>No crypto in the world can help you if I simply bug the fricking physical keyboard!

I'm sorry, can you point to that "fricking physical keyboard" on my iPhone? I'll wait.

And even if you want to talk purely about PCs and attached keyboards, there is no inherent reason those couldn't be locked down too were it a general problem, and have a system refuse to trust any peripheral by default. HSMs can also be part of an overall plan that can mitigate some damage even from a keyboard bug. Furthermore, breaking into a private residence or business is a significantly more time/information/resource intensive problem then subverting a centralized repair place through which lots of hardware passes and is left unattended, and which will not in fact generally include peripherals (if my computer is broken, I bring just the computer in, not the keyboard/mouse/monitor).

To get it out of the way, I disagree with the GP.

If you've looked through any number of the NSA or CIA leaks (Vault 7, for example) you'll have seen a device that looks like a standard Ethernet magjackn+ USB connector that has a little tiny processor embedded inside of it (it leaches power from the USB power rails, IIRC) that can be used to exfiltrate packets and the like.

It's not impossible to get bugged when you send your PC in for repair. It's also probably unlikely considering that there's many other easier ways to grab your data.

>If you've looked through any number of the NSA or CIA leaks (Vault 7, for example) you'll have seen a device that looks like a standard Ethernet magjackn+ USB connector that has a little tiny processor embedded inside of it (it leaches power from the USB power rails, IIRC) that can be used to exfiltrate packets and the like.

I don't see how that's related? PCs right now don't make use of the kind of cryptographic lockdown iPhones do. In the case of desktops that's likely because it's assumed physical security can be taken as more of a baseline, though in the case of notebooks it's probably more just inertia. The whole "right to repair" movement is precisely because this has been changing. I mean, what you wrote directly argues the case for locking down of hardware, encrypting everything along the busses between chips or having destructive tripwires or both, and so on.

>It's not impossible to get bugged when you send your PC in for repair. It's also probably unlikely considering that there's many other easier ways to grab your data.

The nature of security though is that it's worth being forward looking to what will come down the line in the future. Particularly if we're talking about legislating it and putting the force of law behind making one decision or another, which tends to then be quite difficult to change. Isn't it worth being cautious about?

> I'm sorry, can you point to that "fricking physical keyboard" on my iPhone? I'll wait.

Well, you have the digitizer, but since the buttons are highlighted when pressed, the display would work as well.

At the end of the day, there is a piece of flex carrying the raw signal into whatever chip will postprocess it. This is equally true for your touch input as it is for the physical keyboard. Your failure to understand this dooms any hope you have of making the case for cryptographically secure hardware.

So what you're saying is that you don't think there need to be any right to repair at all right? Because by your very argument here, none of it can possibly get in the way. Which means that no legislation is required and companies can keep on locking things down as hard as they want because you say that can't possibly ever work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com