Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1letterunixname | Hacker News Reader

It can until there's hard hardware chain-of-trust enforcement (like UEFI) with signed images.

Without signed executables, and if someone is willing to spend the time to look for the exact spots in a disassembler in non-verified executables, they can either negate the condition or skip over the license check. This assumes it only happens in 1 location. Every upgrade of that particular file would likely need to be re-patched each time.

The least work semi-automated way to find it is through tracing a initial failure run and then binary search inverting logic of branch instructions.

View on HN

> It can until there's hard hardware chain-of-trust enforcement (like UEFI) with signed images.

Until they make it so we need corporation or government signatures to run software on "our" machines. Until they finally destroy our computing freedom.

> Until

This has been the case for over a decade on smartphones, and corporations like Microsoft are currently hard at work bringing it to traditional computers.

Not at all. Android phones had relatively good user freedom for a long time. You could root them, intercept system calls and return fake data to apps, intercept their network traffic and see what it's phoning home about or even debug the apps themselves. Life was good, the device was mostly ours, we were in control and all these app developers answered to us whether they wanted to or not.

Only now is hardware remote attestation putting an end to all that.

Android phones are still like that if you choose to not buy pixels or Samsungs

Yes, but why would you?

For now.

Not really. Some devices can be rooted/flashed, some others are not rootable in practice. Also, there's another vector to it - SafetyNet. If google decides it can't trust the device, many apps will stop working, sometimes can kill even Camera and the like (e.g. https://www.xda-developers.com/bootloader-unlocking-no-longe... ). And bypassing SafetyNet going to be harder and harder, and device without SafetyNet passing going to be more useless (e.g. McDonalds App will not run without it)

That's exactly what I meant by:

> Only now is hardware remote attestation putting an end to all that.

> It can until there's hard hardware chain-of-trust enforcement (like UEFI) with signed images.

And then hackers will graduate to side-channel attacks... it's a game of cat and mouse. The best bet, IMHO, is to make the cost of cracking exceed the value of what's being cracked.

With hardware root trust the side channel attacks look something like breaking into Apple's most secured facilities and ordering multiple senior employees around at gunpoint.

Hardware remote attestation means your local physical device is as accessible as a distant server. Dumping RAM does not work, tapping the bus does not work, writing your own firmware does not work. It is exactly like an ISP performing a machine-in-the-middle attack on a TLS connection; impossible unless without some way of obtaining the certificate private key.

> impossible

Probably, but I'm not the type who likes to rule anything out completely.

> It can until there's hard hardware chain-of-trust enforcement (like UEFI) with signed images.

That can only happen if Treacherous Computing wins. If you actually have control over the things you own, you'd be able to tell your device to lie about the first stage's signature.

Hacker News sings the praises of Apple doing this constantly and decries anti-trust action to stop them.

It has already happened.

Hacker News is not a monolithic entity.

I'm Hacker News and I never said any of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com