As reported on by Seth on the Cypherpunks list, Matthew Garrett of CoreOS gave a talk earlier today at OSCON, on open hardware design, with a security background. OSCON is The O’Reilly Open Source Convention, probably the largest open source convention in North America. The slides are online, no audio/video yet, AFAICT. (I hope OSCON doesn’t continue to charge for access to post-conference video…)
http://www.oscon.com/open-source-2015/public/schedule/detail/41536
Building a trustworthy computer
Matthew Garrett (CoreOS)
11:10am–11:50am Friday, 07/24/2015
The Snowden revelations demonstrated the lengths that government agencies
were willing and able to go to in order to subvert computers. But these
attacks aren’t limited to state-level actors – security researchers
continue to demonstrate new vulnerabilities and weaknesses that would
permit sophisticated criminals to achieve the same goals.
In the face of these advanced attacks, what can we do to detect and
mitigate them? How can we make use of existing security features, and what
changes can we make to system design? In short, how can we ensure that a
user can trust that their computer is acting in their interests rather
than somebody else’s?
This presentation will cover some of the existing security features and
recent design changes in systems that can make it easier to detect
attacks, and provide mechanisms for defending against them in the first
place, along with simple design changes that would make it easier for
users to ensure that components haven’t been backdoored. In addition it
will discuss some of the remaining challenges that don’t have solid
answers as yet. Topics covered will include: Firmware security, Trusted
platform modules, attestation, and associated privacy risks, Hardware
design to support offline verification, Remaining components that could
act against the interests of the hardware owner
Matthew Garrett is a security developer at CoreOS, specializing in the
areas where software starts knowing a little more about hardware than
you’d like. He implemented much of Linux’s support for UEFI Secure Boot,
does things with TPMs and has found more bugs in system firmware than he’s
entirely comfortable with.
Firmware Security 