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'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'm beginning to worry that every time Rust is mentioned as a solution for every memory-unsafe operation we're moving towards an irrational exuberance about how much value that safety really has over time. Maybe let's not jump too enthusiastically onto that bandwagon.

>>crater+6q
… it is a solution for every memory-unsafe operation, though?

>>Ar-Cur+Bs
No. Rust cannot magically avoid memory-unsafe operations when you have to deal with, well, memory. If I throw a byte stream at you and tell you it is formatted like so and so, you have to work with memory and you will create memory bugs.

It can however make it extremely difficult to exploit and it can make such use cases very esoteric (and easier to implement correctly).

>>choege+gx
That's totally untrue, unless you are using a really weird definition of "memory safety". A rust program that doesn't make use of the unsafe keyword will not have memory safety bugs. We've had programming languages for decades that are able to happily process arbitrary bytestreams with incredibly buggy code without ever actually writing to a memory region not reachable through pointers allocated by the ordinary program execution.

A Java program can't write over the return address on the stack.

>>UncleM+IJ
>"A Java program can't write over the return address on the stack."

Could you say why Java is not susceptible to ROP?