zlacker

>>feross+(OP)
Just the other day I suggested using a yubikey, and someone linked me to the Titan sidechannel where researchers demonstrated that, with persistent access, and a dozen hours of work, they could break the guarantees of a Titan chip[0]. They said "an attacker will just steal it". The researchers, on the other hand, stressed how very fundamentally difficult this was to pull off due to very limited attack surface.

This is the sort of absolutism that is so pointless.

At the same time, what's equally frustrating to me is defense without a threat model. "We'll randomize this value so it's harder to guess" without asking who's guessing, how often they can guess, how you'll randomize it, how you'll keep it a secret, etc. "Defense in depth" has become a nonsense term.

The use of memory unsafe languages for parsing untrusted input is just wild. I'm glad that I'm working in a time where I can build all of my parsers and attack surface in Rust and just think way, way less about this.

I'll also link this talk[1], for the millionth time. It's Rob Joyce, chief of the NSA's TAO, talking about how to make NSA's TAO's job harder.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA

>>static+Di
I'll conclude with a philosophical note about software design: Assessing the security of software via the question "can we find any security flaws in it?" is like assessing the structure of a bridge by asking the question "has it collapsed yet?" -- it is the most important question, to be certain, but it also profoundly misses the point. Engineers design bridges with built-in safety margins in order to guard against unforeseen circumstances (unexpectedly high winds, corrosion causing joints to weaken, a traffic accident severing support cables, et cetera); secure software should likewise be designed to tolerate failures within individual components. Using a MAC to make sure that an attacker cannot exploit a bug (or a side channel) in encryption code is an example of this approach: If everything works as designed, this adds nothing to the security of the system; but in the real world where components fail, it can mean the difference between being compromised or not. The concept of "security in depth" is not new to network administators; but it's time for software engineers to start applying the same engineering principles within individual applications as well.

-cperciva, http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-24-encrypt-then-mac....

>>ignora+El
This is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen supporting the claim that analogies aren’t reasoning.

Edit: apparently elaboration is in order. In mechanical engineering one deals with smooth functions. A small error results in a small propensity for failure. Software meanwhile is discrete, so a small error can result in a disproportionately large failure. Indeed getting a thousandth of a percent of a program wrong could cause total failure. No bridge ever collapsed because the engineer got a thousandth of a percent of the building material’s properties wrong. In software the margin of error is literally undefined behavior.

>>User23+xI
>No bridge ever collapsed because the engineer got a thousandth of a percent of the building material’s properties wrong.

Perhaps not with building properties, but very small errors can cause catastrophic failure.

One of the most famous ones would be the Hyatt Regency collapse, where a contractor accidentally doubled the load on a walkway because he used two shorter beans attached to the top and bottom of a slab, rather than a longer beam that passed through it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collap...

In electrical engineering, it's very common to have ICs that function as a microcontroller at 5.5V, and an egg cooker at 5.6V.

Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars repairing the original Xbox 360 because the solder on the GPU cracked under thermal stress.

It's definitely not to the same extreme as software, but tiny errors do have catastrophic consequences in physical systems too.