To paraphrase Thomas Dullien's CyCon talk:
- We add 3 ARM computers per year per person on Earth right now.
- The only somewhat secure programs we know of focus entirely on containing complexity
- Software is a mechanism to create a simplified machine from a complex CPU - exploits are mechanisms to unlock this complexity
- We write software for computers that don't exist yet because we design hardware and software at the same time.
- We've gotten significantly better at security in the past 15 years, but we've been outpaced by the exponential increase in complexity
- Every device is now a "Network of Computers" - intra-device lateral movement is very interesting
- It's much cheaper to use something complicated to emulate something simple than vice versa, in the age of general purpose cheap CPUs. This generates massive economies of scale, but at a cost...insecurity.
- The economics of chip manufacturing means CPU and Memory providers are driven to sell the hardware they can get away with selling - some percentage of the transistors in a chip are bad, and the chip maker is strongly motivated to ship the least reliable CPU that the customer cannot detect.
- When there's only a few hundred atoms in a transitor, only three or four more makes a big difference
- Until Rowhammer the link between hardware reliability and security was not clear to Electrical Engineers.
- You cannot write real world secure programs that operate on hardware you cannot trust
- Computers are deterministic at the abstract sense, but they are really only deterministic MOST of the time. Engineers work really hard to make it so you can ignore the physics of a chip. But it's still happening.
- Determinism has to be fought for in computers, and is not a given.
- The impossibility of inspectability in the digital sphere
- Everything has firmware, none of which we can really have any assurance of
- Average laptop has ~40 CPUs all with different firmware
- Local attackers can use physics to induce transient faults, which bypasses crypto verification, which then means nobody can get you out
- If control of a device has ever been disputed, it can never be ascertained if it is back in control. This is counter our standard intuition for how objects work.
- The same forces that drive IT's success drive IT's insecurity.
- Halvar loves SECCOMP_STRICT sandbox and wants to make it useful, but of course, making it useful will probably break it
- Computers will look very different from today's architectures in fifteen years - more different than they did fifteen years ago. Engineers are now focused on designing parallel machines, since Moore's law is over for single-cores.
- All the insane complexity we can pump into computation systems is essentially in your pocket.
- It's still early days in computers. How good was humanity at building bridges seventy years after we started?
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