Comment by himata4113 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by himata4113 | Hacker News Reader

bitlocker is generally useless unless the hardware is secure to begin with and while we have tons of 'boot guard' implementations which fuse the certificate into hardware meaning that only the OEM can create firmware that will boot there have been at least 2 instances of these certificates leaking exposing all hardware with that signature and other bypass methods (some boot guards are 'flash' guards were you can only flash signed firmware, but doesn't stop you from directly flashing the spi bios chip).

I had someone demo me preserving PCR values by patching SMM module in firmware without triggering any bitlocker lockout, this also means that you can externally write bios with the smm module as long as you have ~2 minutes to disassemble the laptop or desktop and flash firmware.

This hurts the most when you don't have PIN authentication which means you just need to steal the laptop to exfiltrate data, if you do then you have to have the user boot which then drops a payload exfiltrating data over network or just stealing the laptop again as you can write back decryption keys into non encrypted partition or corrupt some sectors at the end of the disk and write them there.

* modifying smm allows you to patch the boot process loading a malicious payload into hypervisor/kernel.

It's only useless if you assume a perfectly capable attacker. That's not every attacker, though. We're not always up against a nation state actor, in fact, some attackers are quite dilettante. I believe the assumption that if something doesn't defend against the most capable attacker it's useless and we might as well not bother is not helpful.

I know my bike lock can be cut within seconds by someone who is sufficiently skilled and determined. I'm still going to lock my bike.

law enforcement? stolen bags? state sponsored agents? that's the only times you should be worred and it fails horribly at those.

What about employees smart enough to boot a laptop from a thumb drive but not smart enough to disassemble it who just want admin to install some game from a dubious source? What about other scenarios neither you or I can think of right now? The cost of activating bitlocker is so low, I'd do it just in case.

Also, I'd argue the stolen bag scenario usually features dilletante attackers.

I had to think about this and research, but actually bag theft is one of the ways companies are attacked these days.

> unless the hardware is secure to begin

Majority of hard disk encryption done in the HDD/SSD controller is 100 times more crap than BitLocker itself. It's littered with bugs and security vulns. Anybody using it is insane.

we're not talking about the hdd/ssd here, those are not really encryption but data packing and compression algorithms, they added encryption because it's a single instruction for extra talking points.

you use veracrypt which doesn't have any hardware attestation (convenience) features, but it does still leave you vulnerable to the same surface PIN+TPM is vulnerable to. the real defense is making it so opening your laptop/desktop physically fuses something via latch and wipes the key off your system requiring re-entry.

of course, who wants to own a laptop/desktop that you can't open we have enough of that with our phones.

Do you have any citation about that on SSDs built after 2020?

I don’t think manufacturers with deliberately undocumented, nigh-impossible-to-inspect crypto get to claim their bugs are shallow and thus that the absence of evidence for bugs implies the absence of bugs.

Less emotionally but mostly equivalently, the expense and non-cryptographic skill requirements of breaking mass-storage crypto are quite high while the rewards are comparable to those from breaking much softer targets, so the absence of results since that one paper only changes my mind very slightly. Besides, we know plenty of examples of what these kinds of opaque, serious-business, pay-to-play environments produce: cellular crypto is an uninterrupted series of disasters, so is Wi-Fi, and the things that we do know about storage devices don’t point to an outstanding culture of cryptographic competence there either. Once you’ve done enough to slap an “OPAL” label on it (which says nothing about the internals), there’s just no competitive pressure to improve.

There is a right way to do all this, and it’s essentially what NICs do: allow the host to offload symmetric crypto to the device, but keep the results of said crypto accessible at any moment. And it’s not like there are even that many modes used in full-disk encryption, let alone ciphers.

So that's a long way of saying "no, I have no basis for my claims outside deciding that people I know nothing about are not competent", right?

It’s a way of saying that I consider the demand for post-2020 evidence to be cherry picking when there’s evidence from 2018 and little objective (cultural or economic) reason for things to have improved since then. A competent modern businessman will not pay for a competent worker in a very specific narrow field until there are consequences to not doing so (creating such consequences is the purpose of every compliance regime, for instance).

It’s also a way of saying that the entire approach taken by hardware disk encryption (unspecified crypto done inside the device in an unverifiable manner) has, with the benefit of hindsight, proven fundamentally flawed despite its reasonable appearance (in every system which had used it, not just storage), and I wish there was a way to pressure (consumer) storage vendors into going in a different direction. It is simply never a wise choice to trust people’s opaque crypto, however competent they are.

> Majority of hard disk encryption done in the HDD/SSD controller is 100 times more crap than BitLocker itself. It's littered with bugs and security vulns. Anybody using it is insane.

Oversimplified and not accurate. Some manufacturers had flawed implementations, others did not. Also, that was a long time ago. There are advantages to hardware encryption. It preserves performance and mitigates other vectors like cold-boot attacks without having to encrypt RAM, which also comes with a performance penalty. By the way, both software and hardware-based encryption can be combined. Cryptsetup on Linux actually offers this, and before you ask, the keys are split. If one is compromised, the other remains secure.

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