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Controversial Security Paper Nixed From Black Hat
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."
So, did they pull because they had a problem with the demos at the last minute, or is there a more sinister conspiracy-type explanation for this retraction?
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
If the chip is secure, then no mere presentation can undermine its security. If it's not secure, then there's no security to undermine. Don't shoot the messenger.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
(emphasis mine.) Interesting. First time for such meta-commentary by a slashdot editor? I don't think we ever saw the same for one of Roland Piquepaille's many submissions...
The Online Slang Dictionary
Now crackers will have an advantage and the rest of us will be blind-sided.
I don't like the whole [trusted platform module] (TPM) because we consumers are are not trusted in the whole scheme.
But for the few us techies that get this P.O.S. "security" system foisted upon them by their clueless/soldout management, wouldn't be nice to be able to explain why the hacker(s) got through the night before?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Yanked why? ... Maybe because security experts have already exposed *stolen/old/re-hashed concepts* and they didn't want to be embarrassed...
Infiltrated dot Net
...that there is more money just selling the presentation to the highest bidder. Then present it a year later.
Correct me if I am wrong, but if someone adds something like this to a remote execution virus, they can install a virtual machine underneath Windows (any version) and have access to all data, including encrypted volumes?
Nah... I'm just paranoid.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
...more of a dark gray hat then.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Maybe they are putting it on the back burner, not releasing the information and giving it time to get to the point that once they do release it there will be a much bigger effect. As it is now TPM isn't wide spread yet so give it a bit of time and then break it.
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.
My guess is that they could not go to the US from fear of being arrested for breaking the DMCA/some other law. I for sure wouldn't go to the US under any circumstances with information on how to defeat any kind of security.
Security by obscurity still seems to be the mantra.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
Nitin and Vipin Kumar are the creators of VBootkit and they were covered previously on Slashdot here: VBootkit Bypasses Vista's Code Signing.
You misunderstand the way the TPM works. TPM chip computes a running checksum of a number of hardware CPU operations, such as memory access and/or sequence of instructions executed. Then a software in your VM will be asked to return to the remote party requesting attestation a digest value based on a random number sent to you by the other party and then run through the TPM chip. The VM has no access to the internals of the TPM chip (it is an opaque black box as far as the CPU is concerned) and thus cannot compute the correct response. Only the TPM chip can, which it will refuse to do since your running of the VM has altered the "one and only" sequence of instructions/memory accesses that the TPM continuously monitors.
In other words, TPM is specifically designed to defeat virtualization as the virtualized environment does not have sufficient data to recreate the correct responses, only the raw hardware, executing istructions under the supervision of the TPM chip, has.
...Or kick him down a well.
So our country can be free?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Alright, who has been requesting this trusted computing platform bullshit? Speak up! I want to know the name of the one consumer who said "Yes, I really want computers that can be uniquely identified. I hate the freedom that being anonymous brings."
I do want a trusted computing platform. That's because I know how they work, and you don't. You think it limits what code you can run and takes away your anonymity. But those are all lies, fed to you by opponents of the technology, which you have blindly accepted.
The truth is that TC technology lets you prove the software configuration you are running, if you want to. That's it. This will be able to be done per-application, so that you can prove you are running a particular app while keeping other details private. I can think of many good reasons for this; yes, good, privacy-protecting reasons; even good, anonymity-protecting reasons.
But because of people like you who believe the Big Lie, the technology I need to improve privacy and anonymity on the net is being killed even in its moment of birth.
Remember: TPM is there so the vendors can trust the PC, not the consumers (hardware owners) - who are, as far as the vendors are concerned, untrustworthy...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Unless they're Luddites, people aren't opponents of a technology for no good reason. TPM depends on someone else, somewhere, attesting to... something.
How can you object to people attesting to things? People attest to things all the time. Do you get up in arms over the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval? Do you insist that it is an infringement on your freedom that you can't use their Seal dishonestly in business?
Or how about the Verisign root CA key? This is the foundation for SSL security on the net. Do you think they should publish the private part so that anyone can forge signatures by that key and make their own attestations? That would destroy its security.
Secure attestation is the foundation of commerce in the whole world, as well as in the smaller world of the net. The TPM merely applies that same principle on a finer scale, allowing you to attest to the nature of your own software.
For my security, I don't trust anyone else holding the keys in these TPM chips. Apparently, you do.
No one else holds the keys in the TPM. Only the TPM holds the keys. The TPM owns the keys and never lets them go. That makes the TPM, from the security perspective, an autonomous agent; a little robot that obeys certain rules. Everyone knows what the rules are, and thanks to the keys embedded in the TPM which never leave, everyone can tell when a TPM is making a statement. This gives people confidence in what the TPM says.
That's the essence of this enormous threat that everyone is so up in arms over. That there could be an entity in the world that makes verifiable statements of known facts. The bottom line is that people want the ability to make their TPMs lie. Apparently no one can abide the presence of an honest agent in their life.
I call this complete bullshit. I have no desire to defraud or lie to anyone. Yet I want to preserve my own privacy and anonymity. These goals are completely consistent. And the TPM actually serves these goals. Because people know its rules and can trust what it says, the TPM can make statements about what I am doing that are reassuring to others, without me having to reveal any more information than necessary or any details. The TPM allows local filtering of outgoing information so as to add MORE privacy while allowing a degree of remote trust that is unimaginable today.
I could go on and on, but what's the point? You either won't understand or won't believe me. I have read thousands of pages of TPM documentation and understand this technology as well as anyone. You have read a few web sites that are totally biased in their presentation. Unfortunately millions of others are like you, and almost no one is like me.
How can you object to people attesting to things? People attest to things all the time.
Because in this case, attestation means requiring a specific set of applications. If you are not using exactly the applications required by a particular service, you'll be locked out of that service. Bad for free software, bad for the free market, bad for the customer, but great for application vendors who can win themselves "trusted" status!
No, that's not what it means. Attestation does not mean requiring a specific set of applications. It means having the ability to believably report what software you are running.
There is no such thing as vendors who win "trusted" status. There is no such thing as "trusted" vendors. Special or "trusted" vendors are not a TCG concept. No group has more or better access to the TPM than anyone else.
I think I should be able to use whatever applications I want on my own machine.
You can!
I think I should be able to modify them.
You can!
But TCPA stops me doing that, by forcing me to adopt applications that are considered to be "trusted".
No, it doesn't. You can run whatever applications you want.
What it does do is allow you to report your software configuration reliably and believably. Maybe someone else won't talk to you unless you are running a certain software config. That's their prerogative. You can always tell them to get lost. They can't make you do anything you don't want to do. You can run whatever software you want and do whatever you want.
What you can't do is to force other people to behave as you would like them to. They have freedoms too.