Comment by Aachen

5 days ago

I am not a chip designer but from my limited understanding, this "somewhere" is the problem. You can have secret memory somewhere that isn't noticed by analysts, but can it remain secret if it is as big as half the cpu? A quarter? How much storage can you fit in that die space? How many AES keys do you handle per day? Per hour of browsing HN with AES TLS ciphers? (Literally all supported ciphers by HN involve AES)

We use memory-hard algorithms for password storage because memory is more expensive than compute. More specifically, it's die area that is costly, but at least the authors of Argon2 seem to equate the two. (If that's not correct, I based a stackoverflow post or two on that paper so please let me know.) It sounds to me like it's easily visible to a microscope when there's another storage area as large as the L1 cache (which can hold a few thousand keys at most... how to decide which ones to keep)

Of course, the cpu is theoretically omnipotent within your hardware. It can read the RAM and see "ah, you're running pgp.exe, let me store this key", but then you could say the same for any key that your cpu handles (also rsa or anything not using special cpu instructions)

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Aachen

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bflesch  5 days ago

Good points, but might be mitigated by knowing that the first key after boot is for HDD encryption and if storage is limited then keep counter for each key, and always overwrite least frequently observed key.

  • Aachen  5 days ago

    Could work. How do you know what the least-frequently used key is if you can't store them, though? Would need some heuristics. Maybe it could write the first five keys it sees after power on on every power on, or some other useful heuristic.

    Like, I do take your point but it does seem quite involved for the chance that it'll get them something useful, and they still need to gain physical access to the intact device, and trust that it never gets out or the chipmaker's reputation is instantly trash and potentially bankrupt. And we know from Snowden documents that, at least in ~2013 (when aes extensions weren't new, afaik), they couldn't decrypt certain ciphers which is sorta conspicuous if we have these suspicions. It's a legit concern or thing to consider, but perhaps not for the average use-case

    edit: nvm it was proposed in 2008, so that it didn't show up yet in ~2013 publications is not too surprising. Might still be a general point about that 'they' haven't (or hadn't) infiltrated most cpus in general