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zimmerfrei | 2 years ago

More interestingly, Cavium (now Marvell) also designed and manufactured the HSMs which are used by the top cloud providers (such as AWS, GCP, possibly Azure too), to hold the most critical private keys:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/caviums-liquidsecur...

discuss

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joezydeco|2 years ago

Ayup. We use AWS CloudHSM to hold our private signing keys for deploying field upgrades to our hardware. And when we break the CI scripts I see Cavium in the AWS logs.

Now I gotta take this to our security team and figure out what to do.

supriyo-biswas|2 years ago

I'd be surprised if you get anything more than generic statements about how they take security very seriously and they are open to suggestions, but avoid addressing the mentioned concerns directly (and this applies to all cloud providers out there, not just AWS).

I'm sure a few others here would like to see their response as well.

d-161|2 years ago

  The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is 
  receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be 
  mitigated with deployment of a hardware device, which is able to disconnect 
  mains power.

  Intel's main competitor AMD has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure 
  Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of 
  its post-2013 CPUs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

  Ylian Saint-Hilaire, principal Engineer working on remote management software 
  including hardware manageability:
https://youtu.be/1seNMSamtxM?feature=shared

https://github.com/Ylianst

theamk|2 years ago

Nothing?

I mean, you are already in US-based cloud, so if NSA is interested, they will just request information directly, no backdoors needed.

(This is a good test for your security team, btw: if they say anything other that "we do nothing", you know its all security theater)

datavirtue|2 years ago

Nobody cares. If caring gets in the way of easy money. Spoiler...it does.

api|2 years ago

Is there anyone here who actually thought cloud provider HSMs were secure against the provider itself or whatever nation state(s) have jurisdiction over it?

It would never occur to me to even suspect that. I assume that anything I do in the cloud is absolutely transparent to the cloud provider unless it's running homomorphic encryption, which is still too slow and limited to do much that is useful.

I would trust them to be secure against the average "hacker" though, so they do serve some purpose. If your threat model includes nation states then you should not be trusting cloud providers at all.

jacquesm|2 years ago

Lots of people believe that. They believe truthfully you can get to the level of AWS, MS, Google, Facebook or Apple whilst standing up to the nations that host those companies. I've walked into government employees in the hallways of tiny ISPs, I see no reason to believe at all that larger companies are any different except for when easier backdoors have been installed.

TheRealDunkirk|2 years ago

> If your threat model includes...

At my Fortune 250, our threat model apparently includes -- rather conveniently and coincidentally -- everything! Well, everything they make an off-the-shelf product for, anyway. It makes new purchasing decisions easy:

"Does your product make any thing, in any way, more secure?"

"Uh... Yes?"

"You son of a bitch. We're in. Roll it out everywhere. Now."

johnklos|2 years ago

It's interesting to consider the people who, with the very same set of facts, come to completely opposite conclusions about security.

For instance, Amazon has a staff of thousands or tens of thousands. To me, that means they can't possibly have a good grasp on internal security, that there's no way to know if and when data has been accessed improperly, et cetera. To others, the fact that they're a mega-huge company means they have security people, security processes and procedures, and they are therefore even more secure than smaller companies.

For one of the two groups, the generalized uncertainty of the small company is greater than the generalized uncertainty of the large. For the other, the size of the large makes certain things inevitable, where the security of smaller companies obviously depends on which companies we're talking about and the people involved. More often than not, people want to generalize about small companies but wouldn't apply the same criteria to larger companies like Amazon.

There's a huge emotional component in this, which I think salespeople excel at exploiting.

It fascinates me, even though it's a never-ending source of frustration.

enkid|2 years ago

If your threat model includes the nation state where you physical infrastructure is, you're hosed.

numbsafari|2 years ago

I believe this is why the government of Singapore appears to fund a lot of work on homomorphic encryption.

Even when you are a nation state, you still have to worry about other nation states.

wsc981|2 years ago

I feel the same and Snowden kinda said as much regarding phones. To assume each phone is compromised by state level actors.

lokar|2 years ago

Cloud HSM services have always been understood as a convenience with limited real world security, without even considering nation state threats.

dclowd9901|2 years ago

I think there’s such a thing as plausible deniability here. We didn’t know for certain so we weren’t culpable, but now that it’s public record, we really have to do something about it or risk liability with our customer data.

amenghra|2 years ago

You don't need to think about this in a binary fashion. You can split your trust across multiple entities. Different clouds, different countries, or a mix of cloud and data centers you own.

ipaddr|2 years ago

The cloud act ensures this

pyinstallwoes|2 years ago

This breeds the familiar scenario where a group will start saying the link between the two is so clear that there must be a connection. Then you’ll get another group calling the first group conspiracy theorists, and say it’s just a coincidence of probability.

Narrative control and information modeling is so powerful it’s scary.

jacquesm|2 years ago

Post Snowden the first group has some formidable ammunition.

sdiupIGPWEfh|2 years ago

Now get yourself some half-decent psyops and contaminate the first group with supporting voices that emphasize weaker evidence, use poor logic, name-drop socially questionable sources, and go out of their way to sound ridiculous.

amluto|2 years ago

…which is really weird. At least Google and Microsoft are quite outspoken about their in-house secure element technology.

If nothing else, at Google/Amazon scale, I’d be concerned about a third-party HSM losing data.

jhallenworld|2 years ago

It's not surprising because who wants to make their own FIPS 140-2 level 3 compliant key store device?

Also, the Cavium one was the fastest one on the market the last time I looked at this. Thales, Safenet and IBM also had them..

tgsovlerkhgsel|2 years ago

In-house stuff is for security.

HSMs are mainly for compliance, where a customer needs to check a regulatory box, because some rules says you must use a HSM. The more standard it is, the easier it is to demonstrate to the auditor that you've checked the box.