-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On June 27, 2012, Ben the Pyrate asked:
I'm a little confused about all this concern I've been seeing about UUIDs. Could someone explain this to me? How exactly does it hurt your privacy/anonymity if your CPU has a UUID? Or, asked another way, what is the attack vector? What would a hacker or government or other adversary need to do in order to track someone by their UUID? Please help me to understand this threat. Best regards, Ben the Pyrate My answer: In 1999, Intel announced that its Pentium III processors have a processor serial number (PSN). Whereas, Intel had concealed that its earlier processor, the Pentium II had a PSN. See: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BNO/is_2000_June/ai_62263364 / and http://bigbrotherinside.org/ and http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/03/16/finding_your_pentium_ii_psn/ . Intel installed a PSN for digital rights management. I will discuss digital rights management under my paragraph on Trusted Platform Module (TPM). "It (PSN) allows software manufacturers and websites to identify individuals more precisely." From: http://www.geek.com/glossary/P/psn-processor-serial-number/ "But what I thought was the most interesting was that the processor serial number still gets reported to the Windows operating system." From: http://discussions.virtualdr.com/archive/index.php/t- 100736.html "Pentium III's serial number could be read by external programs." http://www.hardwarecentral.com/archive/index.php/t-52051.html Privacy groups protested against the PSN's invasion of privacy. The EU and China intended to ban Pentium III. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III Therefore, Intel developed software that would disable the PSN for users who's BIOS did not give an option to disable PSN. Disabling means that the PSN would not be visible online. Whereas, the BIOS option and Intel's software did not work. The PSN leaked and was visible online. See: http://articles.cnn.com/keyword/pentium-iii and http://bigbrotherinside.org/. The PSN also leaked because malware hacked Intel's disabling. Intel asked Symantec for a patch. The patch did not work. Intel's misrepresented that it would discontinue inserting PSN and in its place use TPM (Trusted Platform Module). Whereas, Intel continued to insert PSN in its next processor, the Pentium 4. See http://www.hardwarecentral.com/archive/index.php/t-49252.html TPM's invasion of privacy is discussed at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html and see section on How can TC be abused? at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa- faq.html TPM is a 1 GB microchip on the motherboard. TPM is not in the processor. TPM has an universally unique identifier (UUID). In addition to its own visible UUID, TPM creates a composite UUID containing the serial numbers of other hardware such as the internal hard drive. Websites, government, IT administrators and hackers can see these UUIDs. For example, if a consumer purchases an e-book or software and changes his or her internal hard drive or copies it onto another computer, the e-book will not play. Government, hackers and information brokers can track the activity and geolocation of computers by their UUIDs. Websites that read the UUIDs can sell this tracking information along with other tracking information to information brokers who resell it to investigators who resell it to abusers. There is more than version of TPM. "Meanwhile, there are spin-offs and enhancements whose security characteristics were embedded even more strictly. Examples are Intel's LaGrande Technology, ARM's TrustZone, and starting in 2006, AMD's Presidio is expected to hit the market." Besides being tracked by use of a credit card, consumers can be tracked by the UUID when they do online banking. ARM's TrustZone Secured PIN entry for enhanced user authentication in mobile payments & banking • Anti-malware that is protected from software attack • Digital Right Management • Software license management • Loyalty-based applications • Access control of cloud-based documents • e-Ticketing Mobile TV http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone.php ?tab=Why+TrustZone? Marvell uses ARM processors. ARM processors supporting TrustZone include: ARM Cortex-A15, ARM Cortex-A9, ARM Cortex-A8, ARM Cortex- A7, ARM Cortex-A5 and ARM1176. I could not tell by reviewing Marvell's website which ARM the Kirkwood 88F6281 or the Sheva processor in DreamPlug has. Could you please ask Marvell? Hackers had it easy when one OS dominated the world. One article discussed that hackers are performing less software attacks and instead attacking processors. Hacking the processor at the kernel level gives complete remote control of the computer. A PSN makes the processor visible online. A PSN makes the processor vulnerable to hacks. Firmware rootkits that infect the BIOS are not always erased by flashing the BIOS. See articles on the mebromi firmware rootkit. A mesh network and OpenVPN and proxies, such as TOR, do not fully grant privacy. The PSN and/or TPM's UUID are visible offline. I cannot cite references on this. I have been hacked offline, first by my wifi card and after I removed my wifi card and bluetooth card, by my PSN. Yes, computers can be hacked via their wifi cards even though the computers are offline. See http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/hacking/2006-08- 02-wireless-hackable_x.htm There are plenty of articles on hacking bluetooth due to bluetooth's MAC address being visible. The old methods of tracking computers were IP address and MAC address of the wifi card. If this were completely sufficient, there would be no reason for PSN and TPM. The fact that they exist means that they enable tracking of computers via hardware. Don't give a false sense of security by promising privacy unless you are also offering hardware privacy. Except for MAC address on wifi cards, we had hardware privacy prior to Pentium II's PSN. FreedomBox can ask Marvell and/or other manufacturer to "down grade" to the early 1990s and give us back our hardware privacy. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Charset: UTF8 Version: Hush 3.0 Note: This signature can be verified at https://www.hushtools.com/verify wsBcBAEBAgAGBQJP67VMAAoJEMry4TZLOfxm9YAH/RRVV+M52JUhjH6deNF4NuOSTFcU /65DRVoplKsGYpM4G7SBcc7oIN1/xG2C5P8CGusEqZ/IKYcgFur5oJ9ixRC0X9ssuTQ4 zSXtlNSujFP+fIBSaSMTanJ/fpIN0f8UF02XsymhHnXI/nidAkEkC2vbPiwDo+x9+Hvx VEL7Yhybwfqt4JmbZDiBSes3x0/gXQwYbIvg+QqPKvJnugVv7LX8AflvftaxWrsQSjCC SHSyaelIJaf6D663NdkHCB7pYipEBoywRKrODS2TQDNTgEeeCdMdhqx51TNLFCNfmIxc XMqqsV4maHFsWONHMRhBJ/BqHD0E3RZHeHpevA69Bco= =QIA5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
