14 replies
8h44m
A network card with opaque firmware is a 0-day away from becoming a global catastrophe.
Even RISC-V based switches like the Vega use proprietary switch chips (Wuhan China designed FSL91030M specifically), which is no better.
You can verify input/output to a certain extent, but this doesn’t preclude a timer based function call or a tailored packet activation.
I wonder why our society tolerates these unknowns. With the push towards WiFi replacing the majority of home networking, I’m not confident it will change any day soon.
Sorry to throw a Rumsfeld at you, but I think these are "unknown unknowns".
If people were aware of the presence and significance of such critical knowledge voids I do not believe they would tolerate them.
I see it as the job of civic cybersecurity to bring precisely these sorts of things to wider attention and educate folk on why they are are problematic.
I think visibility is one aspect, but not the whole story. An average home user runs Windows and doesn’t necessarily care if a hypothetical backdoor could exist in their hardware/software stack.
They browse the web, do their banking, and share photos on SM after checking their mail and searching for Tiramisu recipes.
The existential threat to themselves is low, so they don’t dig further into the ramifications. Journalists, whistleblowers, activists, “undesirables”, those are the primary concerned parties.
The civic cybersecurity aspect needs to lay out a clear benefit to free speech and oppression which makes tangible sense to day to day life. I’m not quite sure how to spread this level of awareness, or highlight the importance of such measures in a way that hits home.
Being worried about a hardware backdoor in your network card is more about technology fetishism than realistic threat analysis.
It's like suburbanites being worried about home invasion. Sure, it's technically possible to happen, but the concern reflects personal neuroses rather than practical considerations.
There's a disconnected, individual grandiosity in both cases - "what I have is so valuable that other people want to take it!". Conveniently, the solution always seems to be more individual actions to disconnect further. Security systems, lockdown, heightened fear of a shadowy Other.
While I do agree this may apply somewhat to the original topic, your dig at suburbanites seems like a mischaracterization. Perhaps the upper/upper-middle classes feel this way. I would expect most other folks are primarily worried about being murdered during the event.
While I do agree this may apply somewhat to the original topic, your dig at suburbanites seems like a mischaracterization. I would expect most other folks are primarily worried about being murdered during the event.
With the murder rate in America near historic lows, I think the person you're replying to is spot-on. It's a lot of hysteria fueled by social media, foreign actors, and the fact that security paranoia is a very lucrative business for a lot of companies.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
Yes, there has been a recent uptick, but it's still 30% below what it was 30 years ago. Heck, it's almost 20% lower than it was 100 years ago.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088644/homicide-suicide...
To find a U.S. murder rate lower than 2014, you have to go back to 1906.
But security companies, alarm companies, conservative politicians and their media partners, police unions, and others with a financial interest foam at the mouth to make it seem like things have never been worse.
These statistics do not help anyone create a reasonable personal risk assessment.
Murder is at an all time low! But my sister in law is a drug addict, and last year she got mad so her boyfriend shot and killed a family member right in their nice suburban foyer.
There's more to it than that.
A fascinating finding is that the explosion of cybercrime (against the person, so scams, theft etc) inversely and almost perfectly tracks the fall in violent physical crimes like robbery, hijack, burglary [0].
This leads to the problematic idea that a high tolerance is given to cybercrime because it "shifts" it to a more acceptable form (given that all other factors, policing budgets, causes of crime etc remain constant).
That's one interesting conspiracy/explanation for why rampant digital crime is officially played down whereas almost non-existent street crime is "marketed" by Amazon Ring and other elements of the "Insecurity Industry"
[0] https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/measuring-the-...
You are minimising [0,1].
(I also think you are wrong in your risk asessment)
[0] https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/minimizing.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology)
I get the sense it isn’t possible. “What do I have to hide?” “Who would target me?” “I have nothing worth stealing.” Sadly, all those are common replies to what you’re saying needs more awareness.
Your gmail account - which is used for password resets from anywhere on earth
Criminals
How about your identity?
I think people understand cybersecurity very well in the context of a phone but don't think about it with desktops or laptops.
I let someone who was housesitting for a neighbor use my phone because she had left hers in the house and accidentally locked herself out. The neighbor called her back (on my phone of course) and she automatically handed it to me so I could unlock it.
My phone was never locked: too much of a pain to bother with.
It struck me then that I'm the only person I know who doesn't lock their phone. And that's primarily because I wasn't using Google Pay or had any information on that phone more sensitive than my mom's phone number.
For most people it seems that since a phone is a more personal item than their laptop, they instinctively do more to secure it.
People do understand the risks in cybersecurity very well [0].
Here we interviewed literally ransom strangers on the street, There are about 10 or 20 individuals in this episode but in fact I've interviewed over 100 now and it's all the same;
1) People are very aware of risks, phishing, backdoors, bad links, not scanning QR codes, not installing dodgy "apps"... they get it. Kids get it, Old people get it.
2) They are very aware of the consequences; "identity theft", being tricked, having money stolen, being embarrassed or blackmailed, loss of device or denial of service... Mums get it. Grannies get it.
3) There are daytime TV interviews with people crying their hearts out on camera after being scammed of their life savings. These are popular programmes presented by family presenters like Angela Rippon and Ester Ranzen in the UK.
4) They don't have the first clue who to turn to, or any sense of empowerment to do anything about it (other than abstain). Some think the government should step in. Others say schools and parents are responsible for educating kids from a young age in digital self defence.
So the old "What have I got to hide" trope is painfully naive now and limited to a few diehard old computer beards still in denial that their Internet got fucked-over by criminals.
I think it's important to be in touch with what real people (outside our echo chamber of developers and hackers) really think.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=18
Society tolerates an infinite number of unknowns because it's impossible to know everything, or even a microscopic corner of "everything". The tradeoff for every society larger than a subsistence farming village is things you can't see happening over your horizon that you have to trust. Or trust in the vague hope that someone else is checking and would notice if things went bad.
I had to look this up, and the business address is of course Shenzen, where you'd expect. https://milkv.io/about gives a Romanized address of "1603, Block B, FengHuang Zhigu Building No.50 Tiezai Road, Xixiang, Baoan Shenzhen, 518102 China", which is in a different administrative area from Wuhan and five hundred miles away. Not that it matters.
Heh and farming, even subsistence farming, is at the mercy of weather/climate, animal migration patterns, human labor and thus health…
Nobody has perfect knowledge of their world. All we have are heuristics that work well enough to get by. It’s by definition impossible to anticipate out-of-context events that barge in like the Vogons.
Excession by Iain Banks is a fun exploration of this concept. It’s set in his “Culture” universe, where a hybrid human/AI culture enjoys an interstellar empire. Excession imagines that powerful civilization encountering a phenomenon that is as far beyond them as they are beyond us, or we are beyond the subsistence farmer.