Posts by Christian Berger

In the Meantime...

...have some SCADA in the cloud. No, I'm not joking. It's a real thing, you can look it up. Usually it runs on Microsoft Azure.

How do they know?

The M2M project I've been involved in used cheap pre-paid SIMs from ALDI. There's no way they could know what we use it for.

I wouldn't have expeced otherwise

The Blackphone went down a wrong route. It's just a slightly modified standard phone.

The problem with that is complexity. Mobile operating systems are orders of magnitude to complex to be secure. More complexity means more errors, and more errors mean more security critical errors.

Another problem on those devices is that you have several instances of "binary blobs", code running with very high privileges, facing outside, but having never gone through some sort of security audit.

If you actually want to have a secure device, you need to design it differently. One important thing is to spread out your hardware to different components connected via simple interfaces. Todays mobile phones often have their GSM/UMTS/LTE baseband connected via shared memory or USB, this means that once the baseband is is compromised it's plausible it can attack the application processor, and therefore read out all the keys... or just fake the display.

If you had a simple high speed serial port running a much simpler protocol like PPP, this becomes so hard it gets implausible.

You could have each function of your mobile phone done by an independent microcontroller. The software running on each of those would be simple enough that it would be essentially bug free, so it wouldn't need to be updated. Simple protocols could reduce the attack surface even more.

Without any need to update your software, you could just embed your electronics in transparent resin with a bit of glitter. That would even make the hardware tamper evident.

Then you could greatly simplify the software architecture. Since it'll always be possible to get keys out of your device, and since the CA concept of TLS is severely broken, you could just limit the communication of your device to a single server you own yourself. Since you can exchange the key in advance, you can simply use symmetric encryption. Securing a server is much easier than securing a device that's inside your pocket.

Actually PrivateCore seems to be complete Snakeoil

They claim to have security benefits by encrypting RAM. They claim to do this by having a "secure hypervisor" in CPU cache. Which is hard enough to do, but they don't seem to have any actual credentials in security.

The way they are trying to get around the obvious "boot another OS" attack is by using bootloaders that only run signed code... something that may sound good in theory until you realize that it typically depends on certificate chains... which have so far failed in so many places and are regularly exploited on the Internet. It's not designed to protect the user, but to protect business models.

In essence, they are running more code, which will mean more bugs and therefore more security critical bugs. There's very little security benefit in that.

Well looking at it more realistically...

The "GSM" baseband is very complex adding layer upon layer of code trying to implement standards which are in part badly designed.

Added to that is the principle that the network is always trustworthy, so those implementations were never tested against malevolent networks.

What makes this a really big problem is that some mobile phone manufacturers use shared memory to have the baseband talk to the application processor. So if you take over the baseband CPU you'll likely be able to compromise the rest of the system.

It's a tradeoff

A computer that's a factor of 2 slower, but secure seems like a great tradeoff. I mean there are people willing to trade in much more performance for much less security benefits. Just look at antivirus users.

The problem probably is profitability

I mean we already let computers make decisions which are bad for society, for example in high speed trading. As long as this is not explicitly forbidden, corporations will go on doing this.

Corporations themselves are like machines. Although the individual parts are humans, the whole thing behaves like a being. That is why corporations must never be half-treated as people as its done now in the US, where corporations can do nearly everything people can, but they cannot be sent to jail. If you send an individual of a corporation to jail, it'll simply work around that missing part.

It's still surprisingly popular in Germany

So far every large furniture store I've seen had one, as well as some large electronics stores.

There's always a slight chance...

that Cisco actually fixes their bugs.

The strategy of the NSA is not to do the bare minimum to get to the data, but to do everything they can. So they probably knew about such bugs, but still added hardware... just because they can and they want to have redundancy.

Raspberry Pis are possibly easy to detect

They run on USB, and USB transfers can only start at defined times, I think even just once per millisecond. So if your replies come in regular steps, you know it's an USB network card and therefore most likely a Raspberry Pi.

Not much different to what's already the case in Germany for example

DRM is still legal and even protected by insane laws.

Broadcasting is explicitly forbidden to be recorded, it isn't in Germany.

I fail to see where the step forward is.

What's great about it..

...is that there is finally some sort of standard for booting and running ARM systems. So now you can just boot whatever OS you want on any of those RPi clones. Sure it's not a great standard, but it sure beats UEFI.

The problem with IPTV is...

...that there don't appear to be any simple and published standards. Sure there actually are standards in use to get the multicast streams from your ISP, however you'll never know what they use and if there's DRM in there.

What we would need is a public standard for IPTV. Something DRM-free which I can ask for in a store like DVB-T or DVB-S. This is the base for interoperability, particularly in the face of open source solutions which become more and more important as the commercial solutions more and more act like malware.

From my experience working at a German "tech" company...

... this shouldn't be to difficult. Just get rid of all your MBAs and bad engineers and the remaining few will be able to work much more efficient. At least that's what you'd do to a German company to become competitive.

I wonder how such a tool looks like...

...particularly considering that for many years the only way built-in way of reading the system logs was through a non-resizable window.

We should outlaw DRM

If there wasn't any DRM, services like Netflix would easily cache via a transparent cache and we wouldn't have that problem.

Other than that it seriously makes me wonder how bad the infrastructure in the US must be that ISPs actually cannot get proper affordable upstream bandwidth.

The questions are...

...is it an open standard, free of patents?

...is it easy to implement on your own without weird libraries?

Only you can answer those 2 questions with yes, it's worth investing into it.

Happens regularly in industry

However in industry nobody outside notices, except when the company goes bust because of it.

It's just customers money anyhow, so why should they care?

Actually light doesn't "bounce off" the edges of a fibre optic cable....

...at least not in anything "communications grade". Of course it will for cheap SPDIF-like systems, but if you want to reach high speeds you encounter a rather simple problem: The parts that bounce around will take considerably longer to arrive than the parts which go through straight through the middle. This may not sound like a lot, but it adds up. If you have a 100km cable a percent longer or shorter ways can really spoil your bandwidth.

Instead fibre optic cables actually work more like microwave waveguides by providing an environment where, ideally, only the wave you are interested in can exist. This involves lots of math.

What did you expect?

Apple is one of the few companies that doesn't give out their source code. What other reason, except for betraying the user can there be for this?

I think we should ban binary only software. It's not just to much of a security risk, it's also a question of consumer rights. If I buy a car or a vacuum cleaner I have every right to modify it in any way I want. Why don't I have that right with software? Why can't I just patch out features I don't like or patch in features I'd like to have?

Yes, it's all in the LTE advanced roadmap

So they are, in a nutshell, implementing what is planned to be implemented for years.

Surely it's nifty technology, but it's barely news.