This is so true.
The idea that a program can approach some optimal bug-free state, never to be modified or refactored again, doesn't resemble any project I've ever encountered.
497 karma · joined September 27, 2015
The idea that a program can approach some optimal bug-free state, never to be modified or refactored again, doesn't resemble any project I've ever encountered.
I may be stating the obvious, but that's a bit of a strawman. Yes, writing good FFI code is hard; yes it could result in security/soundness issues; yes, we could use better tools in this space.
But nobody rewrites C code in Rust if they believe existing codebase is free of memory safety hazards; they rewrite it because they think the result will contain fewer hazards, even accounting for the potential problems at the FFI boundary.
If I could remove tens of thousands of lines of hard-to-analyze C code, and replace it with tens of thousands of lines of safe Rust, paired with a few hundred lines of hard-to-analyze FFI adapters, that sounds like a pretty good tradeoff to me. I now know exactly where to focus my attention, and I can have confidence that the situation will only improve with time: better tooling may allow me to improve the dangerous FFI layer, and in the meantime I can recklessly improve the safe Rust module without fear of introducing new memory unsafety bugs, unsound behavior, or data races.
"Solo Hacker can be converted to a secure version, but normal Solo cannot be converted to a Hacker version."
This is probably the right tradeoff for most users. Solokeys has done a great job of providing continuous support for all of their products, and their software stack has been open source since the beginning. That (combined with the low price) makes them my first choice for a hardware security token.
Nice find! I had been wondering why I had been seeing odd TLS failure messages recently.
Not Einstein. It's a quote from a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet.
"What’s that?" she asked.
"The ugliest T-shirt in the world," he said… "So ugly that digital cameras forget they’ve seen it."
I haven't seen this done on Linux. Has this trick been implemented on other systems?
I faced the same situation; after being rejected, all I had to do was file some extra paperwork ("special circumstances") saying that I'd left my job and no longer had any income.
Sorry, it doesn't count as open source if everyone needs your permission to run it.
Even though it's run over the same wires, it's a separate protocol from the hardware JTAG probe you describe.
It's much more like a conventional mall than a downtown: It's effectively walled off from the rest of the neighbordood. You're expected to go there by driving your car, and it's isolated by its massive parking lots so nobody would consider walking in or out a pleasant experience.
10b5-1 plans set up by the company will sometimes have a rule that no changes are allowed for 30 days, which solves the problem. Not sure how widespread this practice is.
Note that this (and not raster display) was actually the problem Bresenham was describing in the 1965 paper.
Amusingly, the stock firmware for the Makeblock XY Plotter kit did not use Bresenham's algorithm-- and has horrible artifacts due to crazy rounding errors. Reimplementing Bresenham on a plotter does feel a bit like a trip to the past.
I don't agree that the authors of the present paper are exempt from criticism for this reason.
From your paper: "We assume that the victim system runs a filesystem on top of MLC NAND flash-based SSD."
It seems very naive to be surprised that people would assume this is an attack on SSDs.
There are some things that are not just hard, but computationally infeasable. Triggering random bit errors and expecting to pass both the LDPC error correction as well as the extra checksum probably falls in this category.
I'm afraid I don't follow your suggestion that triggering SSD GC could somehow result in some other attack. This is simply the firmware automatically repairing the damage you were attempting to inflict. I don't see an additional attack vector here.
Since flash is already an unreliable media, hardware & firmware already works very hard to conceal and silently repair any errors before they accumulate to a data corruption scenario. This is very different from a rowhammer-type attack because there is an active CPU that already works to prevent this type of damage when it occurs naturally (or due to a naive workload that reads hot locations often).
I am unconvinced. They have not demonstrated an attack on any real-world SSD; instead they have attacked their own FPGA-based design.
The attack assumes that you can control or predict the physical location of data on an SSD, which is unlikely on a system that is doing other I/O.
But worst of all, the "attack" assumes that if you can target the right physical block/pages in flash, you can somehow hit that location with sufficient read-disturb that the result will decode successfully, AND pass ECC checks, meaning the resulting bad data will be returned to the host system.
I am highly skeptical that this could ever work on a real SSD. The combination of BCH/LDPC error-correction codes combined with a final checksum should make "random bit flipping" impossible to leverage.
Oh, and there's one more thing: SSD firmware keeps counters, to ensure that read disturb can't corrupt data. Any read pattern that hammers a particular location will trigger garbage collection or data rewrite to a fresh location.
So still not great, but a bit of googling shows that leaded avgas is less than 2% of total civilian aviation fuel in the U.S.: https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecas...
That's... interesting.