Secure hardware

[Aspman]

You going for the CIA description of information security:

Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.

When you look at hardware security in terms of the CIA then reliablility becomes important in terms of integrity and availability and are easily measurable for hardware. Computer broke = no availability = security failure.

Hard drive corrupts = loss of data integrity = security failure
Network card losing packets = loss of integrity and availability.
Poorly designed CPU allowing overflows could = failure in confidentiality if the intruder gets root.


Think of an issue and think about how it affects CIA of a system.

[The Duck]

Hardware has no effect on security? Okay, then how about network printers? And there's a lot more hardware that are almost computers all by themselves. Phones these days are also not that safe anymore as they used to be because some wireless virus that seems to be running around wildly.

But my main concern is about internal hardware though

Exactly, and that's what he was talking about to, so why are you babbling on about stuff that is not part of the conversation??

I agree with rcgreen, I don't see how hardware really affects security these days... What's the point of making a hard drive spin so fast that it breaks?? Data loss?? Big deal, I got backups, you should to... Back in the day people used to do that for the hell of it, but now it's all about information. My last comment, that's what I was talking about, actually hacking into a computer and stealing information by exploiting internal hardware does not seem to be practical these days. The only useful thing you might be able to do is gain root by exploiting the CPU like aspman said... But even then, there are easier ways of gaining root....

[Katja]

Originally posted here by The Duck
Exactly, and that's what he was talking about to, so why are you babbling on about stuff that is not part of the conversation??

Ehm... I did start this conversation...

And of course the security of a network printer does matter. What if some trojan virus manages to infect not only computers but also printers? In the past this wasn't very likely but these days many hardware components are almost small computers all by themselves. A printer virus would of course be removed when the printer is turned off but many network printers are kept running for weeks, and maybe even longer.

The same for a graphical card. What if a worm can install itself in the memory of the graphics card? Again, it would be removed during a reset but of course you can always get infected again. Modern cards have at least 64 MB of memory for their own processing so there's enough room for a small worm to hang around.

And well, you might not be that worried about harddisks that break because some worm told them to because you have back-ups, but it is a costly operation to have them replaced.

Sure, having secure software is more important but that's just it. Software is getting so secure these days that hackers sooner or later will try different approaches to get access to sensitive information. A hardware attack might have less risks of detection. Some worm that installs itself in the video-RAM on start-up might not even be noticed. And it could collect some kinds of information until another application retrieves the collected information and sends it to the hacker. It would make some interesting spyware.

[catch]

This question is a mixed bag...

At the standard consumer level, hardware is about performance and not security. This doesn't mean that hardware security controls are not available to consumers... just that we don't tend to use them. Software tends to have the requirement of universal functionality, so clearly vendor specific enhancements are largely ignored.

CPU security rings vary from vendor to vendor, unfortunately these don't tend to be effectively utilized by consumer operating systems. Some main boards offer memory and bus segregation, again these have little use at the consumer level.

Systems lock LOCK even go so far as to use a second processing system (System Independent Domain Enforcing Assured Reference Monitor | SIDEARM) to handle security related processing. If you think that is out there... don't forget about EM (TEMPEST) shielding and LED high/low water mark systems (to prevent the useful observation of LED emissions on networking equipment).

Hardware you will find at the consumer level includes NICs and hard drives with their own data encryption processors, but this doesn't seem to be quite what you are asking for. Nor is hardware with startup integrity checks like those found in high assurance systems and the new TCPA focused systems.

All insecurity issues stem from incomplete/ineffective security controls or a leverage failure. In this case the latter is important. To that end I would focus on hardware designed (and prolly marketed) with stability as the focus and not performance.

cheers,

catch

PS. sec_ware and !mitationRust are spot on, as is Aspman's second post the people here who think hardware has no impact on security clearly have had no exposure the higher assurance systems and fail to understand vulnerabilities work (see attached: section 4.2 a hardware fault can introduce a high degree of unpredictability to a process, even more than a software fault can... which in turn results in the greater likelihood of a vulnerability becoming exploitable)

[Aspman]

http://niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme/index.html
http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/library/rainbow/
http://www.cesg.gov.uk/indexNS.cfm
http://www.cesg.gov.uk/site/iacs/ind...displayPage=13
http://csrc.nist.gov/
http://www.niscc.gov.uk/niscc/index-en.html
http://www.cert.org/
http://www.itsecurity.com/

[The Duck]

And of course the security of a network printer does matter. What if some trojan virus manages to infect not only computers but also printers? In the past this wasn't very likely but these days many hardware components are almost small computers all by themselves. A printer virus would of course be removed when the printer is turned off but many network printers are kept running for weeks, and maybe even longer.

Honestly, you insult my intelligence with this comment... Once again, you failed to realize what I was talking about. I was talking about hardware inside the PC tower... NOT nodes connected to a network...

The same for a graphical card. What if a worm can install itself in the memory of the graphics card? Again, it would be removed during a reset but of course you can always get infected again. Modern cards have at least 64 MB of memory for their own processing so there's enough room for a small worm to hang around.

Since this was brought up, I'm curious, if this is possible, does anyone know what can be accomplished from this?? It is kind of interesting ...



Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but software run from an OS like windows XP these days do not have actual access to hardware to prevent freezing and system instability... So wouldn't this mean that it would be extremely hard to accomplish exploiting a computer hardware wise?? Unless you were exploiting a windows 95/98 computer or had physical access to the computer... Am I right? Because honestly this is just something that popped in my head 2 seconds ago lol...

[catch]

Since this was brought up, I'm curious, if this is possible, does anyone know what can be accomplished from this?? It is kind of interesting

A better and more practical example would be NIC cache rather than Video RAM.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but software run from an OS like windows XP these days do not have actual access to hardware to prevent freezing and system instability.. So wouldn't this mean that it would be extremely hard to accomplish exploiting a computer hardware wise??

Depends on the level that the software is run at... user space applications should not have this level of access... that doesn't mean they can't take advantage of hardware flaws. Duel processor cores might give rise to instances of synchronization/serialization errors, but let us not forget very simple flaws like filling up the audit partition to supress the the audit trail.

Hardware security is an important field, but for most of us it should amount to little more than selecting hardware that is unlikely to reach and unforseen state (non-confined failure) and to this end the hardware must be robust and stable above all else.

cheers,

catch

[rcgreen]

Hardware could be used to make a device secure, but there is a
trade off in functionality. Example, the write-protect on a floppy disk.
If the drive is designed so that the write-protect tab physically disables
the drive from writing, then your software can't override that,
any more than a remote "hacker" could override the fact that you
pulled the network cable out of your box to protect it from him.

There is a hierarchy of authority. If a hard drive had firmware onboard
in ROM, that filtered the type of data that could be written, no OS or other
software could defeat it. But if devices were designed with such limitations,
the unintended consequences would mean a lot of crappy hardware with
inane quirks that made them mostly unuseable.

General purpose hardware needs to be programmable, and adaptable
if only to reach a wide enough market to make money.

So, don't expect to see network cards on the market that are hard wired to
stop viruses, worms, or porn from reaching your computer.
Now if the DRM guys had their way...

[!mitationRust]

Well I couldn't stop researching this topic....... I ran into this road of different models and projects, some shady and I don't know how they measure up to the yardsticks of the industry or if they're even complete. XOM — a processor architecture, Cerium architecture, AEGIS (I know I thought of the radar too)

the secure CPU. XOM and AEGIS

physically tamperresistant processors to support tamper and copy evident computing. XOM and AEGIS do not to trust the operating.

Say what?

Implementing an Untrusted Operating System on Trusted Hardware
http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/~lie/Pa...sp2003-sub.pdf

Currently, there exist various initiatives that place the trust in
modern computing systems in a hardware component rather
in software only. In these systems, the applications don’t
trust the operating system to protect their data, and the operating
system does not trust the application to properly use
its resources. The result is that the interface that the operating
system exports to each application must change to
support the hardware security features, and some of the protection
aspects of the operating system must be moved into
the hardware.

Certifying Program Execution with Secure Processors
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rtm/paper...um:hotos03.pdf

Conclusion
This paper describes Cerium, a trusted computing architecture
that provides tamper-evident program execution.
Cerium uses a physically tamper-resistant CPU and a
-kernel to protect programs from each other and from
hardware attacks. Cerium reports what program is running
and what hardware and software environment surrounds
the program, so the a user can decide whether to
trust a program’s output.

[Und3ertak3r]

When We talk about security what sort of security are we talking about:
Software, hardware, network.. all of the above?

with a PC, what are we after and where from are we protecting

1/ The complete denial of access to the PC's data, and its operational processes from:
a/ out side the room,
i/ outside the Systems Network
ii/ with network access
b/ inside the room, outside the systems Network, not in physical contact with the machine
c/ inside the room, on the systems Network, not in physical contact with the machine
i/ Guest/user access to network
ii/ Admin access to the network
d/ in physical contact with the machine, and with:
i/ only guest access to the system
ii/ with Admin access
e/ internal access to machine.. boot access

What level do we protect to..

just the data
Usage information.... user profile
the integrity of the software ie prevent user reverse engineering or cracking a program
Software profileing
prevention of running non certified or pirated software
Product branding (this is a MS computer piss off *nix ..etc)
Hardware locking.. modding/cracking

As already mentioned there are hardware criteria for security, as well as the various software many of us are familure.

Network security is another level

no matter how well secure your home, it isnt if you leave the key under the mat