Re: [dsfjdssdfsd] Discussion: Malicious Entropy Attacks: Eggs, and Baskets

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On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:18:29AM -0400, Arnold Reinhold wrote:
> 
> And note that not all the issues I raised are software
> related. Tempest, for example, is a very tricky business. The NSA
> specs for Tempest protection are not publicly available, but I have
> been told they require tight physical configuration control, as even
> a single wire change can destroy Tempest protection.  Perhaps the
> best that can be achieved is to keep any attacker a safe distance
> from critical systems. A determined attacker might be willing to
> absorb the effort and risk to covertly penetrate physical security
> barriers if doing so will lead to a permanent compromise of a
> one-time-seeded PRNG, less so if the benefits will last only briefly
> as the PRNG reseeds after they leave.

One of the things which is not obvious is whether or not each
contributor has the same threat model in mind.  (In fact, it seems
pretty obvious to me that we don't all share the same threat model,
but I'm trying to be polite.  :-)

The sort of things that you might need to worry about if you are
trying to protect against pervasive monitoring are very different if
you are worried about a targetted attack.  If someone is willing to
bring in a listening truck and park it outside your house, or coverly
penetrate physical security, there is a whole host of things that you
would need to protect against before you are fully protected against
that level of attack.

In particular, who cares about how carefully constructed your RNG
might be if the attacker can replace it (along with perhaps your
entire networking stack, and the monitoring tools that might allow you
to notice that something strange has happened to your system)?  Or
just simply drop in some malware which leaks the session key after
your perfect RNG that meets with all of the academics' worries about
state compromise recovery....

						- Ted