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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

The IBM one for z was level 4 I think..

Yes: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cryptocards?topic=4768-overview

This is so weird. The idea of an adversary covertly walking off with an IBM Mainframe or covertly bringing an electronics lab, a microscope, logic analyzers, glitching hardware, etc to the aforementioned mainframe is rather strange. Whereas someone doing that to a phone or a laptop or a game console is very likely.

If I wanted to store an important long term key in a secure facility, I would worry, first and foremost, about software attacks, attacks doable over a network, malicious firmware attacks, and maybe passively observed side channel attacks. Physical attacks would be a rather distant second.

Evil maid attack applies to data centers too doesn’t it?

Sure. But the attacker needs to actually get in, which is considerably harder than getting into a hotel room. But more relevantly, the kinds of countermeasures that get you from level 1 to a higher level don’t seem likely to help at all — if some evil-maids or otherwise fully compromises a machine hosting a FIPS 140-2 level 4 HSM, they likely get the unrestricted ability to perform cryptographic operations using keys protected by that HSM, but they get this by using the HSM’s normal API. If they can convince the HSM to export its keys to another HSM (oops) or to otherwise leak the key material, they get the key material. But this doesn’t seem like it has much to do with physical attacks against the HSM.

Now if someone evil-maid attacks the HSM itself, that’s a different story. Any good HSM should resist this, especially one found in a portable device. And this is because you can steal an entire important corporate laptop or other portable device without necessarily raising an quick alarm, whereas I have trouble imagining someone walking off with the HSM out of an IBM mainframe or with an AWS HSM without the loss being noticed immediately.

(To be fair, in the mainframe case, some crusty corporations seem to have a remarkable ability to fail to notice obvious crypto problems like their public facing certificates expiring. But a loss of an entire HSM from a secure large cloud datacenter will, at the very least, immediately trigger “elevated failure rates” or whatever they like to call it…)

> Sure. But the attacker needs to actually get in, which is considerably harder than getting into a hotel room.

It depends who is the attacker. There are countries (western democracies) where the police regularly "visits" datacenters.

It's not weird.

The adversary will show up and badge in just like everyone else. They might have worked there for 20 years, or they might be an outside repair person or external consultant.

They will definitely fit in. They're supposed to be there.

It will be the most normal thing in the world. And you may never know their real purpose.

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