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Graphics Cards: the Future of Online Authentication?
Gunkerty Jeb writes "Researchers working on the 'physically unclonable functions found in standard PC components (PUFFIN) project' announced last week that widely used graphics processors could be the next step in online authentication. The project seeks to find uniquely identifiable characteristics of hardware in common computers, mobile devices, laptops and consumer electronics. The researchers realized that apparently identical graphics processors are actually different in subtle, unforgeable ways. A piece of software developed by the researchers is capable of discerning these fine differences. The order of magnitude of these differences is so minute, in fact, that manufacturing equipment is incapable of manipulating or replicating them. Thus, the fine-grained manufacturing differences can act as a sort of a key to reliably distinguish each of the processors from one another. The implication of this discovery is that such differences can be used as physically unclonable features to securely link the graphics cards, and by extension, the computers in which they reside and the persons using them, to specific online accounts."
see subject.
Doesn't it seem like a bad idea to have your ID linked to hardware? Wouldn't that mean you could not share a computer without sharing your identity?
I could see this being a good thing, and a bad thing. If online accounts are using hardware to determine the user account, whats to stop someone from just "borrowing" your hardware and connecting to your account? Sure, they could still have user names passwords and such as backup, but then what would be the point of doing the hardware authenication? Plus how much of a pain in the ass would it be to upgrade your computer and notify the online account to expect changes in your hardware for the next time you login?
Bah, i think i'm rambling now... need coffee... or beer... beer sounds better
While the card's "identity" may be different, it doesn't matter if something can stand in for the hardware and provide a false ID.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What if I change hardware? There would have to be some insecure system to re-tie my account which defeats the entire project.
So, if an online service does implement this, would upgrading my graphics card break my account?
I have a home Linux machine, my wife's machine, my laptop and my work machine.
How can I share my authentication amongst them ?
UPS Sucks
That's good and all, but the obvious flaw in this plan is that the average gamer's least permanent piece of hardware is a graphics card.
Why not just admit that they've found the unbreakable DRM? Online authentication is a solved problem.
You can feed false information to the software that reads the characteristics of a graphics card just as you can fake an MAC address. I fail to see a substantial difference.
securely link the graphics cards, and by extension, the computers in which they reside and the persons using them, to specific online accounts.
Especially so for apple computers, which seem to be rebought as often as new pants.
If this fingerprint is orders of magnitude beneath manufacturing controls, are the researchers sure that it persists over long time frames?
Will that graphics card have the same fingerprint the first day it is purchased as it does 2 years later after putting in hundreds of hours at high temperatures playing accelerated games?
Stunning that nobody noticed the real problem with this: if you get a new video card, either your identity changes (silly) or you've got to somehow tell the universe that your identity is now associated with a new signature (socially engineerable). So you get the worst of both worlds: ID that's still easy for criminals to hijack, but hard to avoid if you're concerned about privacy...
That's cool, nifty in a geeky sort of way. This quote makes it about fifteen years outdated, though:
"securely link the graphics cards, and by extension, the computers in which they reside and the persons using them, to specific online accounts."
One person !=one device! Commodity software like Strongbox already ties one human to one online account, without needing to install special software on the client end. Sites like Girls Gone Wild have tens of thousands of attempted account spoofs daily and their security prevents that by looking at how the person uses their mouse, among other things, and without locking each user to only one device.
From:
http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html
the best I can figure is they're doing something like shutting off memory refresh and seeing what the cells look like. That's the most best source of random mfgr "stuff" I can think of.
Other than that, I'm mystified how they're doing it. There just shouldn't be that much mfgr variation.
It could be that there's only a couple bits of randomness (like they're reading out the model number and calling it good). The fact they aren't advertising the details implies the details are less than impressive. For example this ancient box has a Radeon HD 4350, so my "real" /. UID is not VLM, its RadeonHD4350-VLM. Unimpressed... so far.
My guess is the idea is to use the device characteristics as a REALLY crude second factor for authentication. So if I log in on my phone, or any of the other dozens of machines I have access to, it'll pester me for my pet dogs mother's maiden name, the city name where I got my first pedicure, the month of the year that I was divorced in, the usual BS authentication questions that anyone with access to facebook can crack in a few minutes.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's not a good idea to use the particularities of a hardware production process as the theoretical basis for authentication.
If you have ISPs give everyone a fixed IP address, you get ID down to the house level. Have cell phones use fixed IP addresses too. That gets most of the world IDed fairly well and it doesn't require a fancy new API to allow a web site to pull some hardware ID from your computer - it's the same as the address they're sending data to.
It can be a man-on-the-side attack, too.
The attacker just needs to have something running on your machine that they can use from their machine to provide the answers to your bank.
This is not technically an interposition attack, it's a referral attack, similar to the captcha breaking systems which proxy a captcha to a human wanting to look at porn, the human solves the captcha, gets the porn, and is happy, while the system proxying the captcha has used the solution to attack an unrelated system normally requiring detecting an actual human to avoid attack.
You can feed false information to the software that reads the characteristics of a graphics card just as you can fake an MAC address. I fail to see a substantial difference.
"The more difficult question to answer at this point, she said, is whether someone could use software to emulate the differences in behavior between graphical processing units. Lange said the key is finding a way to guarantee, in an authentication process, that the party attempting to authenticate a user is communicating with an actual GPU and not software attempting to replicate its behavior and uniqueness. Lange went on to admit they aren’t quite there yet, which is why the product is not finished."
Not entirely true. Good security is based on 3 things:
- something only you have (your graphics card, a physical key)
- something only you know (a password)
- something only you are (biometrics, typing patterns)
As it stands today you usually have one of those things, the password. Adding in something difficult to spoof as the summary suggests is an improvement. So now you have to have a password and a graphics card with certain flaws.
I agree with your sentiments though. This is an interesting idea but seems awkward to implement.
How long before we have to worry about our graphics cards leaking personally identifiable information?
Produced randomly also means they can't be sure that no two are produced identical. Are manufacturers going to track the random flaw in each chip to be sure there are no duplicates?
I'm interested, but sceptical.
I don't need to clone the hardware, if it is just the source of some data. I can simply replay your data on my machine, no matter what the hardware is. You can't prevent that - if you could prevent software manipulation, you could skip the whole hardware step and embed your key in the software.
Hardware as authentication only works if actual calculations are done on the hardware (Smartcards, SecureID, etc.) or you are able to interface with the hardware (RFID chips, keycards, etc.) directly.
You could use the uncloneable hardware data as a secret key, but then I can get at your key the same way I could if you stored it in a file - hacking your machine. I just need to look in a different place.
But for a low-security fingerprint, it's too much hassle - you could just use the serial number, network card MAC address, etc.
So even though this is quite an interesting approach, I don't quite see a practical application.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have upgraded my video card twice this year alone, do you seriously expect me to jump though hoops of bullshit just to get my software running again? I own more than one game, and one song... douches
Every time I upgrade my graphics card, all of my games stop working.
I'm sure that there's something wrong with this, but I can't put my finger on it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That's cool in a nerdy sort of way. Ten years out of date, tough. I guess they didn't look at what's already available, what used to be available and is no longer used, and why. This sentence puts ten years out of date: "link the graphics cards, and by extension, the computers in which they reside and the persons using them, to specific online accounts" 1 person 1 account! Commodity software that's been widely available for many years already ties one account to on human user, across multiple devices, and without requiring special software on the client end. Consider the sites that get attacked, all day long, every day. Sites like Girls Gone Wild have tens of thousands of spoof attempts everyday. Sites like that have had an effective defense for many years. GGW, for example, uses the readily available Strongbox package which tracks the way the user users their mouse, among other things, to confirm that the user (human) really is who they say they are. Ten to fifteen years ago modern systems like Strongbox displaced earlier systems which assumed that 1 user = 1 device. These researchers are reinventing the steam engine.
This is just an extension of the CPU-ID and mega-cookie to track your device thru the web. That is good enough for it to be very useful. Yes, in some cases multiple people share a device, but that percentage is low enough it won't matter.
More details
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4397404/Gamers--phone-users-promised--intrinsic--security
Uh, yeah. Because I always access my online stuff from the same exact computer, sitting in the same exact place. This is a great authentication scheme... in 1995.
I wonder if the specific parameters used to identify a card (note not a user or a machine...) can change as the card ages, as it wears. Heat/Cold cycles, failing bits in memory, changes / updates in drives, malware infecting drivers or firmware... (that last would be -real- fun... suddenly you are not you.)
This the computer equivalent of biometrics and has all of the same security issues as biometrics for people.
Sure the graphics card can't be cloned just like you can't clone a finger or retinal print. However if the authenticating system is compromised then it becomes really really hard to establish your credentials again - although replacing a graphics card is easier than replacing a finger or eyeball.
See The issues with biometric systems (the first thing that popped up on google for me)
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I thought best practice was not to rely so much on "something only you are". A lot of biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints, have been replicated, and such identifiers that have been compromised can't be revoked and reissued so easily.
Yes, in some cases multiple people share a device, but that percentage is low enough it won't matter.
Let me guess: you live alone. In a lot of households, especially with two parents and one or more children, everybody who lives there has a user account on one PC.
Not entirely true. Good security is based on 3 things:
- something only you have (your graphics card, a physical key)
- something only you know (a password)
- something only you are (biometrics, typing patterns)
As it stands today you usually have one of those things, the password. Adding in something difficult to spoof as the summary suggests is an improvement. So now you have to have a password and a graphics card with certain flaws.
I agree with your sentiments though. This is an interesting idea but seems awkward to implement.
From the perspective of the one doing the verification, that's something you know, something you know, and something you know.
Nobody comes out and physically inspects your graphics card or looks at your thumb print or asks you to present a key fob.
They all ask for the numbers programs of devices output. Keyfobs generate a specific code at a given time. Biometric scanners generate a hash given a specific input or any similar input. This GPU scanning program will do the same. These things are hard for an attacker to know, but they're not much better than a password. Someone can know your GPU fingerprint, your retina scan, or your keyfob's info in the verifier's database in much the same way they can know your password. Your shit gets hacked, the verifier's shit gets hacked, someone attacks you locally, someone is MITMing your ass, etc.
Good security is based on 1 thing: A human physically inspecting another human for each and every access request.
We don't have good security policies on the internet. We have very good security policies wherever rich and powerful people give a shit - bank vaults, nuclear missile silos, celebrity weddings. Good security is not possible on the internet because people refuse to pay or wait.
For most users, it goes like this (most important to least important): Cost, convenience, ability to spy on the ex or that bitch whore Tammy, peace of mind, weather bug and desktop buddies, security.
This wouldn't be your ONLY source of authentication. But it could certainly be used as multifactor authentication (much like Google Authenticator is used today).
Julio Henrique Morimoto juliohm@gmail.com
if it's well-defined enough for software to use, it's well-defined enough to emulate.
Unless current computers aren't fast enough to emulate it in the time that the party on the other end of the network connection demands. Try running PBKDF2 in hardware vs. in software.
Putting aside the fact that this probably isn't something we want, it's hard to see how it would work.
Presumably, the side doing the verification requires some model of the flaws present in the users graphics card. The card is interrogated in some way, and the verifier checks the results from the card against it's model.
Do they have some trick by which, the model used to perform the verification is of no use to an attacker attempting to fool the verification? ie, they can store data that allows them to check you have the graphics card, but not emulate the flaws of the card? That would certainly be neat. It's hard to see what that trick would be - but I can't quite convince myself that it's impossible.
The problem is not that the user has a physically specific characterstic, the problem is that you have to trust the user that the software is really getting the data from the hardware, and not from a fake driver made to reproduce what is required, or a VM.
They're depending not only on it being faulty but being faulty in a way that doesn't make it unusaleable.
GPUs commonly have non-working cores disabled to increase yield. Perhaps they're looking for minute differences in the time that a computation takes based on which cores were chosen to be disabled at the factory.
If you read the site, they're looking at the uninitialized state of memory. Let's say they succeed 100% and find a way to get a specific memory fingerprint from a specific piece of hardware. What's been accomplished? They've found a way to get a password that is (literally) hardcoded.
Is this useful? No. It is just as easy to intercept and steal, harder to move between machines, provides no benefit in DRM schemes (since any software can retrieve this "password"), and adds another point of failure to the security model (you must never sell, discard, or improperly dispose of the memory whose fingerprint is being used).
The only possible use of this I can conceive of is for one time, semi-secure seed generation. Unfortunately, there are already a number of these algorithms based on similar physical principles.
The best case scenario for this research is to provide another alternative to a set of known algorithms with no additional benefits and a number of potential risks. It is a fraud designed to steal grant money.
Sounds to me like it causes a bigger problem than it would solve. The problem with using a built-in graphics card, is that all your online accounts would suddenly be tied to the ONE device with that graphics card. You wouldn't be able to login from any other device, and that includes any new devices you buy to replace old ones. I hope I'm misunderstanding something 'cause that sounds like a useless technique in a networked world.
...and your 16yr old babysitters boyfriend sits down at your computer while you're out to dinner and your premise for security is out the window. The simple fact of the matter is you can NEVER be sure the person on the other end of a computer connection is who they say they are. Once you assume that, the rest of your security procedures become rather simple.
My bank allows me to move money from one of my accounts to another of my accounts. That's it. The worst that can happen is someone hacks in and moves all my money to savings causing my auto-deposits to bounce. But they have protection against that as well.
If I want the ability to transfer money from my account to someone else account, I can turn that on... but I have to show up in person, at the bank, and sign a notarized release form while 2 bank representatives are present. The release expires after a per-determined amount of time that is as little as 3 days and as large as 1 year.
That's security. Computers are not secure devices, get over it.
Don't worry. All of my VMs have unique video cards in them.
But yeah, this is an absurdly dumb idea and doesn't solve the problem they assume needs to be fixed.
IF these people or myself want security we will ahve it , if your too stupid to learn about security when using hte internet i thinks we should start wiping our butts with these people on masse...let an ISP each of them have a walled intranet for noobs and leave the rest of us to the real internet....thats the only real solution and then the applites and dummites can exist without fear of any one bothering them largely.
i dont have a grpahics card so i guess i dont exist btw
REAL DUMB ASS MOVE to make the net more about being rich then about safety
everybody already has a cell phone
Not strictly everybody. In my aunt's family of five, only three have cell phones. The other two rely on the house's POTS phone. And even then, not all cell phones can run "apps". Good luck getting an authenticator application to run on a prepaid flip phone without costing money for a sent text message and received text message.
Cameras are likely already good enough to be used for retinal scans, but it would require the user to position the camera at the correct angle and whatnot which is pretty implausible
I've read good things about iris scans. On a device with a front-facing camera, having the user stare at four randomly positioned icons in the correct order would help get the eyes to the right angle and distinguish a live iris from a printout.
If a dev could use a small section of code to sample several metrics from the card, (or even multiple pieces of hardware), and never let the end user know what data was being used from what was taken it seems like it would be impossible to spoof in order to steal someone's account. As it stands, many people out there will use tricks to hide their IP and use pirated, re-engineered software to get into online games and hack away. They don't care if the serial key or IP they use gets banned as they can just generate or spoof another one. On the one side spoofing the system to think emulated hardware was something other than what's really there might be doable, could you play a modern FPS game using those kinds of emulated techniques? GPU's are single purpose, powerful beasts that I doubt could be fully emulated by a CPU. Considering the amount of threads they could query along with expected speeds, it seems like a good dev could instantly spot an imposter anyway. Add all of that together with an authenticator tied to a cell phone, (if your card died or you needed to just upgrade), and you would have a way to perma-ban most hackers. Generating a new key or IP takes seconds and costs nothing. Having to go out and buy a new video card every time you get caught might actually have a dramatic impact on the quality of online games. Hard to pull off and not really perfect, but dam I would love this if someone got it right.
FWIW: If you read WP2 & WP3, I think they are just attempting to read some of the SRAM from inside the GPU for a source of what they call a "PUF" (physically uncloneable function). They hope to sprinkle some error-correction code and some magic crypto dust the uninitialized SRAM pattern to create a number that will be useable for attestation (basically to assure that it is the machine that you think it is).
This idea isn't new. A quick google search shows papers about using SRAMs as both PUFs and Random numbers going back in 2007 (they called them FERNs) http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kevinfu/papers/holcomb-FERNS-RFIDSec07.pdf
The major problems with this stuff is that...
Once you power up your system, something is gonna want to use that SRAM (GPU vendors aren't in the business of leaving big chunks of SRAM that they don't use for researchers to discover and use), so you have to take a snapshot after powerup, but before someone wants to use the GPU. This makes many avenues of attack available (e.g., you have to put that fingerprint somewhere, because the GPUs will shortly trounce all over it).
Secondly is the stability issue. Although some parts of the uninitialized SRAM is going to be statistically stable (power-up to 1 or 0 pretty reliably), some others are going to be pretty random (in fact other researchers are looking for highly unstable bits in SRAM powerup to be able to extract a random number for a nonce). Across temperature, and over time as the parts age, these bits will change (some stable ones will become random and some random ones may exhibit a strong bias one way or another). Without extensive characterization over age and temperature, this would be pretty unstable to use as a definitive ID.
Third, when GPU vendors notice that people are accessing SRAM before initalization, they will start wiping the memory on boot. This is to prevent this third-party ID usage model (because nobody wants to repeat the intel CPUID fiasco) and because now that GPUs are being used for general-purpose computing, any type of SRAM retention issues across power-up is a security risk. On a related note, there are in fact there are other researchers attempting to use SRAM retention to create a reasonably secure clock (google TARDIS: Time and Remanence Decay in SRAM).
If I had to speculate, about the only reasonable model for this (assuming the GPU vendors don't co-opt it or shut them out) is to create some sort of "ticket" system. Distill a timestamp and a challenge value with the PUF (and maybe even the "random" part of the SRAM for salt) down to a ticket using some cryptomagic. That ticket would be valid for a while, and you'd have to create a new ticket before it expired. Over a short enough time and temperature regime, a security system might be convinced that this temporary ticket is an acceptable substitute credential, but it would not really replace an actual authentication technique.
This stuff has also been researched extensively for 5 years or so. I don't know what these folks are really bringing to the table (other than they are looking at GPUs for big blocks of SRAM). Why be so secret? Maybe it's because they want to keep that funding coming. A quick google showed someone in 2009 even wrote an undergrad paper on the subject of SRAM/PUFs... http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031709-141338/unrestricted/mqp_sram.pdf
the key is finding a way to guarantee, in an authentication process, that the party attempting to authenticate a user is communicating with an actual GPU and not software attempting to replicate its behavior
That's no small detail there. That's absolutely everything. That's the content industry's version of proving that P = NP: if they can do this, then all of their most insurmountable problems instantly become solvable. For example, they can finally achieve an unbreakable DRM scheme.
Ultimately, the authentication data will always have to flow through software, which is endlessly malleable. Their only hope of success is on platforms with a fully locked-down boot loader. If you can control what the computer boots, then you will be able to circumvent this authentication.
As covered on Slashdot, waaay back: Intel proposed a unique identifier for every processor. However, once the proposal went public then "mark of the beast" and other interests got it canned. This article is simply attempting to replicate, badly, what Intel proposed to do in a clean manner.
I don't see then "being there" anytime soon either. Any hardware can be emulated, it's just a matter of how much resources the crackers can put into it - it doesn't have to be a basement geek, it could very much be china/NSA/KGB/wharever.
So it may be fine and dandy that my home PC is ultra secure when logging into my email. What about my phone, tablet, laptop or public computer?
So you can distinguish between two supposedly-identical graphics cards. Ok, yeah, I guess that's neat. One hacker test point for you. But you're really reaching for applications of this knowledge, aren't you? Dude, give in: it has no useful applications. That's ok. Be happy about what you did anyway, use it to impress some chick in a bar ("hey baby, did you know I can tell your Radeon from another Radeon?"), and go on to the next project.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Try again. Are they going to ID you through the firewall? Not everyone has their own machine, and if a burglar takes your PC... consider yourself pwnd.
Not entirely true. Good security is based on 3 things:
- something only you have (your graphics card, a physical key)
- something only you know (a password)
- something only you are (biometrics, typing patterns)
Good authentication is based on 3 things. Good security depends on a lot more, like not getting hacked so they can go crazy with your credentials. My online bank uses two-factor authentication for each unknown/big transfer so the integrity of my bank account is pretty good, but pretty much all confidentiality is out the window if they can piggyback on your connection and if the security is only at the gate then the rest too. I'm not concerned about my authentication tokens, they're fairly safe. It's the devices I input them to that worry me.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The phrase is "one and other." When you use it wrong you sound like an idiot.
TFA doesn't mention how they calculate these metrics but (maybe naively) I assume it's deduced by measuring differences in performance for a given task?
This begs the question: what happens if the performance of your graphics card changes, say for example your GPU overheats or the fan gets clogged up with dust, surely that will change the results of the 'authentication' process?
But this wouldn't work for me. My evga graphics card is FTW flawless!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I don't see then "being there" anytime soon either. Any hardware can be emulated, it's just a matter of how much resources the crackers can put into it - it doesn't have to be a basement geek, it could very much be china/NSA/KGB/wharever.
You don't even need "crackers" - just get a virtual machine and turn on GPU emulation.
I don't think so. That's why I don't carry a debit card. Oh wait. What I'm saying doesn't actually make sense, because the card is only one factor of a two-factor authentication scheme. Silly me.
So what's stopping someone from spoofing whatever is being checked? There's no way for a remote server to know you actually HAVE the graphics card you say you have. May as well authenticate with mac addresses.
Thanks for pulling in the additional information. I do find the comment "The order of magnitude of these differences is so minute, in fact, that manufacturing equipment is incapable of manipulating or replicating them." to be very hard to believe. If they can detect it then the manufacturing process can detect it too.
Why is the first thing I thought about when I read this "another way for the MPAA/RIAA to track down copyright violators so they can send drone strikes"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
So they want to use the single most unreliable hardware component in my PC to identify it and potentially control whether I have access to my online resources?
Over the years, the graphics card is the one thing that consistently ends up cooking itself. Never mind that something as simple and common as a firmware version change or a driver version change can and does modify its behaviour.
Or they could store more than one hardware fingerprint, just like you can have more than one key in your authorized_keys file.
The actual website indicates it hasn't even been done yet, and is lighter on details than white bread.
It is complete BS, the website has no details and tons of press releases. Here is how much work they have done so far, about a dozen lines of text:
http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP2.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP3.html
I think they posted the release in hopes of letting the online community discuss ideas, and will then harvest those.
Lame.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I should've thought of that. It's brilliant, tho obvious to some, it's still brilliant. Kudos!
There are really only two things. Something you claim to be, and something you can present as evidence of that.
"Something you have" could be either, but it's not really separate.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
So they've come up with a secure, unique way to generate a key that, as yet, is neither secure nor unique. They need to "find a way to guarantee" that the system is talking to a real GPU. And how does one guarantee that? Could it be... by using secure keys? They need to authenticate their authenticator? Recursive problem anyone? How about we just cut out the GPU and use whatever they come up with for guaranteeing their guarantee? This is such a non-story it's almost laughable.
The moment I have to authenticate myself in order to use the Internet, beyond the ppp username/password in my DSL router, that'll be the moment I stop using the Internet.
What's wrong with these people that they have this insatiable urge that everything and everybody needs to be identified and authenticated.
I am so sick of that.
What a waste of time and resources. Why don't these "researchers" actually do something useful.
Both AC and raymorris' posts need modded up to 5. Both are perfect responses to the article, shooting it down completely.
I still havent heard a good explaination for why all 3 things are not, essentially, "something you know". Until we switch back to analog, all of them are going to be encoded at some level as digital data and sent as part of authentication, right?
Or am I missing something?
My guess is they overclock the GPU until it fails (in this context "fails" means stops working 100% correctly, not catch fire) , and then check what failure has occurred. Do the textures generated on CPU core 15 start dropping bit 12 when running at 933MHz? That sort of stuff.
The propagation delay between and through components is very sensitive to difference in processes, and unlike overclocking memory or CPU over-clocking a GPU will not make the whole system unstable. Of course these sorts of failures are temperature sensitive, but in general the same things should fut out first should fut out first regardless of the temperature....
More of a fingerprint than an immutable key....
even if they made it so you can authenticate by video card, it doesn't mean it's forgery proof, you can always hack the software to report the same result that someone else's video card generated and bypass the entire thing altogether.
Given that this is an issue of identities, I was thinking something. Why not use networking cards to do the authentication? Since IPv6 is getting slowly introduced, chances are that things will evolve there over time, w/ networking cards, which currently have a 48-bit MAC address, instead having a 64-bit interface ID 'address'. Now, that could have an encrypted version of one's ID, be it SS#, DL# or whatever stored in a random part of the ID. So that that way, it can be used in the event that online authentication is required. Note that the ultimate IPv6 address, if not autoconfigured, need not be derived from this.
I do agree w/ the parent that this would seem to mean that nobody could lend or borrow, say, an iPad or a laptop w/o handing over one's identity along w/ it. But this could help in other ways. Like for instance, most of us don't do major online purchases from internet kiosks - we do it from home or work. Therefore, it's not a bad assumption that if someone is doing a major online purchase w/ a credit card from a kiosk, it's probably using a stolen card.
I am really sorry, but I've got a book, printed in mid-80s that suggests nearly the same method for identificating hardware. Turn off DRAM regeneration of a memory block for a while, then read the contents. These methods are really useful for, to say, identification of a stolen notebook.
So which one of my cards is it going to use, Many of us have more than one graphics card in pc's these days working in parallel. Also I upgrade pc parts often, It may think I am not the person I claim to be.
You just get locked out of everything?
te
Sure, smartcards aren't 100% foolproof, but they're purpose-designed for this sort of thing, are tamper-resistant, have widespread support from a variety of vendors, are cheap (I recently bought a new USB token [with integrated smartcard] for 17 EUR), and there's standardized interfaces for communicating with them.
For general online authentication, use something like OATH one-time passwords (such as produced by hardware tokens, Google Authenticator, or other compatible code generators). It makes password guessing infeasible. For high-security things, smartcards are a better way to go.
This research is interesting, certainly, but there's already much more practical and widespread methods of authenticating users (even though weak passwords seem to be the standard these days), so why bother with a new method that is less flexible than existing methods?
> The order of magnitude of these differences is so minute, in fact, that manufacturing equipment is incapable of manipulating or replicating them. Thus, the fine-grained manufacturing differences can act as a sort of a key to reliably distinguish each of the processors from one another.
Non sequitur. Even if another hardware cannot replicate that, the fungerprint info is eventually digital, else it could not be transferred over the net. Therefore a piece of software, running on another digital computing hardware can replicate them, provided the "another hardware" is Turing-complete and sufficiently powerful. Some 99% of today's computers are Turing-complete and the 2015 mainstream CPU or VGA card will be sufficiently powerful, considering the Moore law, that has done its duty for the past 25 years is still refusing to go away... Governmental supercomputers are sufficiently powerful today.
The above revelations seriously limit the practical usefulness of the VGA card fingerprinting idea.
Actually they are saying that GPUs are good candidate for PUFs (physically unclonable functions). This means that the GPU would not have one "fingerprint" but a unique function which is specific to it. The standard way to use this is with a sort of challenge response protocol where intercepting any of the messages doesn't help impersonate the user later. PUFs are the physical analog to one-way functions. It may be possible to hack the verifier and then impersonate users to that verifier only, or to hack the computer and impersonate the user temporarily (while you have access to the machine), but it should not be possible to copy the "fingerprint" of the GPU in software and impersonate later. Check out the wikipedia for more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function.
What if your network is lagging?
Then you are not in the audience for a real-time online multiplayer video game.
Satellite connection?
Then you are not in the audience for a real-time online multiplayer video game. Heck you're probably not even in the audience for a single-player game that's a large download because of the single digit GB/mo cap that satellite ISPs apply to home subscribers.
How is this substantially different than the unique CPU ID that Intel tried to do back in the PIII days? Everyone thought that was a Bad Idea because of privacy concerns.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
IIRC, Microsoft product authentication was tied directly to things like the CPU serial number in your PC and maybe even the S/N of the hard drive. Swap a couple components out of your PC and your software dies. How is this any different?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Detecting is not the same as replicating.
Imagine it like this: You are told to use 1 full spraycan of paint per wall, and thousands of walls to paint. The can of paint is not enough to cover the entire wall.
No matter how hard you TRY to paint each wall the same way, if you look hard enough, there will be differences in the spray pattern. Even if you noticed the differences, there really wouldn't be anything you could do to eliminate them, and trying to duplicate a pattern would probably require millions of attempts to get it 'just right'.
It's not so much that the GPUs are manufactured with differences, it's that the differences are actually defects in the manufacturing. Trust me, the GPU makers would LOVE to be able to produce them without any variation, but for now and the probable future, any chip of similar complexity is going to have a bit of a 'fingerprint' due to fabrication defects.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
How would one authenticate a GPU in another PCwithout using the already genuine GPU?
Most people won't like filing a "request" first using their authenticated device
And how to authenticate a new device without physical authentication? IP address? Not safe/practical
A password? Isn't this suposed to improve on that?
I really hope I missed something because I didn't end up here in the first place if I didn't like the idea
This might be useful as an added layer of security for transferring (relatively) large sums of money and using Paypal etc.
I'd advice using long strings to secure private/sensitive information
Example of a password that's not easy to hack, but pretty easy to remember:
"TH# #$RLY B!RD C$TCH#S TH# W0RM & th3r3's n0 pl4c3 l1k3 h0m3" (note that I linked both with "&", but And, 4nd, or $nd would also do fine)
Create a macro with AutoHotkey on your (presumably) secure PC at home to do the typing
On any other PC you either type and copy/paste the password in Notepad (to avoid errors) or, even better, log in on sensitive accounts only when it's absolutely necessary
Do not save the Notepad file (ever!!) and flush clipboard before leaving
There's no 100% safe way to ID yourself, at least, not without resorting to really paranoid methods
The only way to keep a secret is not sharing it (with anyone, anything, anywhere, ever!) But that's not very practical, is it?
Update your video card and lose all your logins.
I wonder how to measure this data, though!
You don't need to control what boots - you merely need to KNOW what boots. Remote attestation works just as well, it is already implemented on the computer you're using now (in hardware - likely not in the OS unless you're using Linux and Trusted GRUB). Yes, Linux is actually ahead of Windows in being a tool for big brother as all the stuff that Microsoft threatened to do the FOSS community actually went ahead with.
You don't even have to emulate the hardware. You just tell the OS that when the piece of software runs the check_authentication() function it instead runs the return_true() function instead. Or you do it in the VM layer, or whatever.
It is just software - you don't HAVE to run what they want you to run.
That would be absolutely useless for any sort of security unless you could physically inspect the device and record the outputs of a batch of inputs.
If you can't replicate what the GPU does, then you can't verify that a given output was done by a given GPU.
And of course it can be replicated in software. It's not magical, it's a physical thing.
verifying a Facebook account requires sending and receiving a text message.
It only involves receiving a SMS, and landlines in plenty of places can do this.
For one thing, can landlines in all places throughout the industrialized anglophone world do this? For another, that allows only one Facebook account per household.
from a technical perspective there's no reason they need to have a 1:1 correlation.
Facebook isn't looking for a technical perspective. It's looking for a globally unique key that has been vetted by a third party with substantial assets, namely a cell phone carrier. If you have used a cell phone to verify one Facebook account, you can't use the same number to activate another Facebook account because the same number is already listed on the first Facebook account.
their GLSL shaders fail to compile on different GPUs... thats how they auth