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Comment by stouset

2 years ago

If you take as a fundamental assumption that all your hardware is backdoored by Mossad who has unlimited resources and capacity to intercept and process all your traffic, the game is already lost and there’s no point in doing anything.

If instead you assume your attackers have limited resources, things like this increase the costs attackers have to spend to compromise targets, reducing the number of viable targets and/or the depth to which they can penetrate them.

One of these threat models is actually useful.

11 comments

stouset

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gigel82  2 years ago

Some of us just assume Apple itself is a bad actor planning to use and sell customer data for profit; makes all of this smoke and mirrors like GP said.

There is absolutely no technical solution where Apple can prove our data isn't exfiltrated as long as this is their software that runs on their hardware.

  • stouset  2 years ago

    You have actually set up a completely impossible-to-win scenario.

    I can advertise a service running on open hardware with open software. Unless you personally come inspect my datacenters to verify my claims, you’ll never be happy. Even then you need to confirm that I’m not just sending your traffic here only when you’re looking, and sending it to my evil backdoored hardware when you aren’t.

    At some point you have to trust that an operator is acting in good faith. You need to trust that your own hardware wasnt backdoored by the manufacturer. You need to trust that the software you’re running is faithfully compiled from the source code you haven’t personally inspected.

    If you don’t trust Apple’s motives, that’s certainly your prerogative. But don’t act like this ridiculous set of objections would suddenly end if they only just used RISC-V and open source. I would bet my life’s savings that you happily use services from other providers you don’t hold to this same standard.

    • gigel82  2 years ago

      I'm looking for a middle ground. I need to use and trust hardware from vendors like Apple but I use as few of their services as possible (and verify that with firewalls and traffic inspection).

      My concern here is with Apple Intelligence and this wishy-washy hybrid approach where some of the time your data is sent to the "private cloud" and some of the time it's processed locally on device. I absolutely hate that and need a big switch in Settings that completely turns off all cloud processing of data; but given how much they're spending on advertising how "private" their cloud is I suspect they plan to not make that optional at all (not just opt-out by default). At that point, all the photos you take might be sent to their cloud for "beautification" or whatever and there's no way to know whether they're also analyzed for other things or sent out to the CCP to make sure you're not participating in a protest against Xi.

    • Jerrrrrrry  2 years ago

      nope.

      FUD.

      Diffie Hellman, Homomorphic encryption, zero knowledge proofs, decentralized triple (sender, messenger, receiver) layered protocol.

      Faraday caged, deafened power supply, Heartbeat/pulse sensors, proximity sensors, voltage sensors, EM/radio triggers, dead-man switch, all reporting with constantly rotating codes.

      Multiple servers in different locations, depending on threat model because of jurisdiction, with XOR'd secrets, with random access to memory to obfuscate the real address if it needs zeroed/oned/zeroed, Da Vinci codex style.

      Make access directly tied to reputation/staked interest/invitation, with subtle canaries and watermarks.

      Even if it got super-chilled and no noticeable voltage disruption, and someone didn't set off any other alarm bells, they still have to get the other machine within the timeout.

      And you could just do 3/5 multi-sig, and apply CAP theorem.

      But if the best people in the world can't do it ("for more than a year"), then there is something less than ideal in the above hypothetical.

      2 replies →

  • rnts08  2 years ago

    Anyone assuming otherwise is just foolish. No mega-corp is protecting the individuals privacy when developing products.

Jerrrrrrry  2 years ago

Soviets used typewriters.

American Lawyers of the highest pedigree (HNWI) don't even use email.

Your hardware is back-doored, as Intel is named "Intel" for a (nearly too poignant) reason.

  • BenFranklin100  2 years ago

    Don’t forget the stealth black helicopters with zoom lenses hovering overhead.

    • Jerrrrrrry  2 years ago

      Remember lurkers:

        they glow in the dark, you can see em in your driving.

  run em over, thats what ya do



  The court entered this ruling despite testimony from an attorney who stated, “[b]ecause of the [FISA Amendments Act], we now have to assume that every one of our international communications may be monitored by the government.”  Id., 133 S.Ct. at 1148.

      https://www.mcslaw.com/firm-news/expectation-surveillance-ca...

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      https://lexingtoninstitute.org/wide-area-persistent-surveill...

        "After scandals with the distribution of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the exposes by Edward Snowden, reports about Dmitry Medvedev being bugged during his visit to the G20 London summit (in 2009), it has been decided to expand the practice of creating paper documents," the source said.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23282308

        Since 2008, most of Intel’s chipsets have contained a tiny homunculus computer called the “Management Engine” (ME). The ME is a largely undocumented master controller for your CPU: it works with system firmware during boot and has direct access to system memory, the screen, keyboard, and network. All of the code inside the ME is secret, signed, and tightly controlled by Intel. Last week, vulnerabilities in the Active Management (AMT) module in some Management Engines have caused lots of machines with Intel CPUs to be disastrously vulnerable to remote and local attackers.

      https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/intels-management-engi...