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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Are they though? I doubt that Apple, or Xbox, or PlayStation, use HSMs for storing their most sensitive keys. If something goes wrong with the HSM, can you recover the keys, or did you just bork your update system forever? In which case, does the key exist outside the HSM? If it only exists on multiple HSMs, how is it protected in transit between them, and is that vulnerable?

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All this, and more, have been successfully implemented many times. Watch the videos of the DNSSEC key ceremonies to get a bit of an idea about how deeply thought out these processes around hardware roots of trust work.

Unfortunately, the HSM vendors are generally just as shifty as a typical SaaS vendor, so don’t believe their promises of secret inviolability if you can get uninterrupted time alone with a device.

Realistically, any decent shop manages all of these risks pretty well, but there’s a loting rigmarole to do it robustly.

That's why your HSM supports, for example, the ability for an appropriate entitled crypto officer to export the private key onto multiple different smart cards for separate custody with M of N required to restore the key, and all that other good stuff.

Right... but at the same time, does that mean that if I break into the homes of Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, Jeff Williams, and Johny Srouji and steal their keys, that I could reassemble the key that would normally be stored on a HSM in Apple Park?

In some ways attacking the homes might be easier than attacking Apple Park. (Just thinking out loud...)

Assuming that you also can get those people to disclose the eight-digit PINs that were required by the crypto officer at the time the custodians enrolled their smart cards?

Getting the pins would be the easiest part.

I doubt that they are entrusted with keys.

If you think attacking the homes of billionaires is easy or novel, I suggest that perhaps you have not considered that you are not the first person with that idea.

Private homes of the ultra wealthy and powerful are usually protected in non-obvious ways that most houses on most streets are not, to put it mildly. It turns out that machine guns are legal for private citizens (such as a 24/7 armed private security team), even in California, if you are wealthy and connected enough.

Yes... and no. Worth remembering according to the Steve Jobs biography he had no security in his suburban home and left the back door unlocked every night, and all the neighbors knew that's where Steve Jobs lives. (Bill Gates once visited and remarked, "You live here? All of you?") On the other hand, for an attacker, this may have been an obvious sign Steve Jobs didn't keep anything useful at home.

But assuming that's not the case now, my point still stands about how it would be maybe easier than attacking Apple Park, relatively speaking. Though, according to Apple's WWDC videos, invading Apple Park to swap an M1 between a MacBook and an iPad is easy when you are the CEO and wearing a rubber mask ;)

I've heard that Xbox used HSMs for the signing keys way back in the days of the original Xbox. I'm not sure why they'd have stopped.

And if Xbox was doing that 20 years ago, I'd expect Apple to be as well.

It'd make sense for Sony, but some of their approaches to software security have been lol inducing, so it wouldn't shock me if they aren't.

I know that at least some of those companies use HSMs. Multiple, actually.

This is why they make backup HSMs.

But if I understand it right, it was Google that screwed up this one. I always thought that they were not taking their responsibility as an OS vendor seriously and they should have taken this horse in back of the barn and shot it years ago.

Given what we know so far, there's no indication that Google is associated with this at all.

If I was a betting man: some smaller fish in the Android ecosystem practiced exquisitely terrible key management outside an HSM, got burnt, and will have to slip KPMG or Deloitte an extra big kickback if they ever want to see a clean SOC 2 again.

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