On Thu 13/Dec/2018 10:48:52 +0100 Andreas Schwier wrote: > >> I agree that smartphones are not safe, but I am not particularly in favor of >> smartcards, dongles, and security tokens like yubikeys, either. >> >> Any kind of special-purpose cryptographic *hardware* is essentially >> proprietary, and too attractive and soft a target for various nations' spy >> agencies to covertly backdoor. "Don't look at me! I've got something to >> hide, and nowhere to protect it!" > > So you really believe that international payment organizations or mobile > network operators worldwide or border control authorities rely their > risk management on a piece of hardware from well known chip manufacturer > that could easily be subverted by a national security agency ?
Let me just note that there are people who believe it so hardly as to arrest Meng Wanzhou. > I you believe that, then an Intel Management Engine, a ARM Trust Zone or > the baseband processor in mobile phone isn't anything better. Then it > doesn't help if your software is open source, because your keys are > "open source" as well. You mean the backdoors in NIST elliptic curves? > I've been working in the smart card industry for over 30 years now and > the tale of subverted smart card chips has been around for ages. It's > one of the often told myths - but there hasn't been any evidence that > this has already happened. Yet, alas, the software on OpenPGP cards "is not available as free software due to NDAs required for certain parts", according to g10code[*]. [*] http://www.g10code.com/p-card.html > Yes, this technology is far from being perfect and so are people > implementing code of those devices. We've seen a number of security > flaws in smart card systems, that is unfortunately true. Still, I would > rely on a smart card well designed for the purpose of keeping things secret. Of course, one has to adjust the local paranoia level to some practical value. >> There's a secure phone on the President's desk, and not even the Secret >> Service can say it's all that "secure." > Fact or fiction ? We miss a theoretical definition of "secure". However, there are lots of funny anecdotes about President's smartphone. >> Open-source cryptographic software that runs on general purpose computer >> hardware is generally much more difficult to backdoor. > And why ? Free software is patched and upgraded much more often than proprietary one. That increases difficulty considerably, methinks. Best Ale _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
