Leaked stolen Nvidia cert can sign Windows malware

Defense in depth.

There is a hint of frequency illusion here. Millions of code signing certificates are stored securely on hardware devices or by other means. A leak of a private key every now and then does not negate the security of the entire ecosystem.

> What’s the value of signed code

A part of the roadmap to only allowing average users to execute native programs their overlords approve of. We're already sadly most of the way there with the scary dialogs and dark patterns anyone has to navigate to run anything unapproved.

The benefit of signed code is it grants hardware vendors a perpetual control, gatekeeping, and rent seeking role. It was never your hardware.

The cover story was security, which might be mathematically correct but in practice has been shown false in every way. Look how much malware gets signed and shipped on devices and sold on app stores: the vendor gets their cut, /shrug. Look how many devices have been intentionally bricked to force new sales - yay them again. And then there's the certificate management illusion.

“If it can’t be 100% perfect then what’s the point” is one of my least favorite arguments.

A single or even multiple breaches doesn’t suddenly remove all value from all other code signing models.

https certificates leak all the time and we still use https. Something is better than nothing. Now, is it worthwhile to use code signing certs to try and certify the identity of the author? Maybe not, it was slowly phased out for https. But we certainly need something because the alternative (just download and run whatever) was tried and definitely did not work out. We don't want grandma doing the equivalent of 'curl http://x | sudo bash' 4 times a week.

"what's the point of laws so complex criminals can't understand them? They'll be broken anyway"

Signed binaries use will come into being with trusted computing, they are embedding Denuvo in the operating system, aka future compilers will allow game companies and companies like autodesk to sign their exe's and the exe's if cracked can be added to a list that windows 11 can force update the bios to add these cracked exes to a list that will refuse to run.

That's the gist of trusted computing they are building an alternative internet/mainframe computer inside yours that they only have access to.

Where have you been the last 23+ years? The videogame industry has been stealing PC games since 1997 with ultima online. Hear it from the dev's themselves.

Don't think MMO's killed local PC games? Listen here kids.

https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134

EA killed ultima 9 when the UO beta got massive interest, that lead to the death of PC games as local applications, the industry from then on there was a massive war to back end all PC games, they couldn't immediately do that to quake and urneal because we'd been treated too good with Warcraft 1-3, Descent 1-3, Quake 1-3, and build engine games like Duke 3d. The entire industry has always wanted to kill piracy and Ultima online gave the entire industry the go ahead once they realized that many of our fellow programmers and gamers were irrationally stupid beyond their wildest dreams.

Anyone playing quake and Descent at the time fear the loss of dedicated servers and level editors which used to come with the games, we knew if Ultima online was successful that Publishers would want to back end every fucking PC game and that's the end of the personal computer and the return of IBM and mainframe computing.

"Signed exe's" and trusted computing is the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in new bullshit language but I don't expect the mmo/steam generation to do anything but froth at the mouth. When they were the ones killing gaming and gave birth to microtransactions.

You can't put MTX in diablo 1, warcraft 1-3, or starcraft 1 because they are local applications that run entirely from your pc. None of the code has been stolen out of the game carved back behind a user account and login requirement. Like with most PC games these days.

We're losing gaming history and generation mmo is to blame for their general cluelessness of the evil of mainframe computing.

Probably not as revoking would likely break NVIDIA drivers.

> Code signed with this cert will, in the right conditions, be accepted by Windows even though the certificate has expired.

The right conditions: https://twitter.com/BillDemirkapi/status/1499735326406938625

Probably not. It's an expired certificate, and AFAIK, expired certificates are removed from certificate revocation lists.

I always use opportunities like this to experiment with whatever workflow I have on Linux to see what state it's at. I just game on Windows and do work on Linux so for me the transition is always quite simple: just install what you want on Steam/lutris and compare performance.

Last time I was starting vanishing of Ethan Carter, but even though it was playable, the experience wasn't free of stutters, whereas windows ran flawlessly.

In any case, it is always nice to jump back and check out how far Linux has come.

It would require code execution on your computer in order to install a signed driver. That being said, any malware using the Nvidia certificate would be the easiest malware to find since we know the certificate used.

As a person who has been doing this for past 20 years, I'd say, yes, you should )

If malware makes it onto your machine, it's already game over. The certificate allows the attacker to load an arbitrary driver, but the attacker doesn't need that to steal all your data.

relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Best not turn it on again at all. Just to be sure ;)

Your certificates will expire. Your computer will be bricked.

I think they are "showing their teeth" cuing that it's just the beginning.

An interesting leak from a entity with a very interesting request in the first place.