Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Controversial Security Paper Nixed From Black Hat

Posted by Zonk on from the keep-it-under-your-hat dept.

coondoggie writes us with a link to the Network World site, as he tends to do. Today he offers an article discussing the cancellation of a presentation which would have undermined chip-based security on PCs. Scheduled during the Black Hat USA 2007 event, the event's briefing promised to break the Trusted Computing Group's module, as well as Vista's Bitlocker. Live demos were to be included. The presenters pulled the event, and have no interest in discussing the subject any more. "[Presenters Nitin and Vipin Kumar's] promised exploit would be a chink in the armor of hardware-based system integrity that [trusted platform module] (TPM) is designed to ensure. TPM is also a key component of Trusted Computing Group's architecture for network access control (NAC). TPM would create a unique value or hash of all the steps of a computer's boot sequence that would represent the particular state of that machine, according to Steve Hanna, co-chair of TCG's NAC effort."

3 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I hope it's published anyway by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The whole point of the design, almost the whole reason for having the hardware in the first place, is that you can't virtualize it. Neither a VM nor a computer without the chip can impersonate a computer with the chip, because they don't have the signed crypto keys which are (supposedly unextractably) embedded in the chip. It doesn't help if your VM is running inside a TC computer, because the TC device won't see the computer as running trusted software (it'll see the hypervisor, which will NOT be trusted unless it propagates the TCPA regime into the virtual system, which is what you're trying to avoid). So the chip won't attest to the VM's trustworthiness, and the VM can't do that for itself.

  2. Nitin and Vipin Kumar are the creators of VBootkit by I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nitin and Vipin Kumar are the creators of VBootkit and they were covered previously on Slashdot here: VBootkit Bypasses Vista's Code Signing.

  3. Re:How could a presentation "undermine" security? by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 3, Informative

    What is more likely to happen? These guys getting silenced and quietly removing their presentation or these guys figuring out they were wrong and quietly removing their presentation.


    While I definitely agree that its very plausible the researchers simply discovered that they goofed, I would also note that there is historical precedent for other motivations.