Nieuwste lek Snowden: computerchips mogelijk gecompromitteerd

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‘We cannot trust them anymore’: Engineers abandon encryption chips after Snowden leaks

The developers of the FreeBSD operating system say they no longer trust computer processor chips manufactured by two of the top tech companies — and cite National Security Agency secrets spilled by former contractor Edward Snowden as the reason why.

Journalist Richard Chirgwin of the UK IT website The Register reported on Monday this week that the developers of the free, Unix-like OS have abandoned faith in two random number generators — Intel’s “RDRAND” and Taiwanese company Via Technology's “Padlock”— after leaked NSA documents attributed to Mr. Snowden have suggested that the United States government and their allies at foreign intelligence agencies have compromised the security of major cryptographic tools.

Chirgwin was the first reporter to catch wind of the news that FreeBSD decided during a developer summit in Malta this past September to relinquish trust in those companies’ random number generators, or RNGs, and meeting minutes obtained by Dan Goodin of the website Ars Technica confirms that programmers became suspicious after leaked documents within the trove pilfered by Snowden accused the NSA of breaking widely-used encryption protocols.

FreeBSD has until now relied on a “random generator framework” within the OS, according to the notes spotted by Chirgwin, containing three RNGs: RDRAND, Padlock and another named Yarrow, designed in 1999 by security wiz Bruce Schneier, among others. Individually and in tandem, these generators rely on digital entropy to randomize a computer’s output, thus masking operations through multiple layers of encryption that were once thought largely impossible to crack. Recently leaked NSA documents, however, have suggested otherwise.

The OS is on the verge of releasing their latest version, FreeBSD 10, but any users that upgrade to that edition won’t be able to rely solely on Intel or Via’s RNGs anymore.

“For 10, we are going to backtrack and remove RDRAND and Padlock backends and feed them into Yarrow instead,” reads an excerpt from FreeBSD’s summit “special status report.”

The developers go on to acknowledge that it will still be possible for end users of FreeBSD to access hardware RNGs — namely RDRAND and Padlock — but the programmers behind the OS say, “we cannot trust them anymore.”

http://rt.com/usa/snowden-leak-rng-randomness-019/

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Op dinsdag 10 december 2013 23:21 schreef gelly het volgende:
Dat is wel een heel beroerde samenvatting. Ze zeggen het vertrouwen in Intel en VIA niet op, ze voeren de output van de RNG's niet direct naar /dev/random maar gooien er nog een extra algoritme overheen. Voor de zekerheid.

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Op dinsdag 10 december 2013 23:23 schreef gelly het volgende:

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Uit fatsoenlijke bronnen.

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Op dinsdag 10 december 2013 23:25 schreef mstx het volgende:

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Nee alleen in de RDRAND instructie van de chips

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Op dinsdag 10 december 2013 23:29 schreef gelly het volgende:

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http://tweakers.net/nieuw(...)n-onbetrouwbaar.html