Top all-time · #15438
Jethro Beekman
Personal blog · jbeekman.nl/blogsecurityhardware
Jethro Beekman's personal blog at jbeekman.nl covers security and hardware. Since 2015, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “ThinkPad ATA Password: Only 12 Bytes of SHA256 Hash”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Jethro Beekman's posts on x86 and Intel security, including Intel's SGX and control of the CPU, and on a Lenovo ThinkPad disk passphrase that was reverse-engineered, plus a Nibble Sort post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-10-27
- ThinkPad ATA Password: Only 12 Bytes of SHA256 Hash2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-17
What Hacker News says?
https://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over...
Comment linking /blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/
on “Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms”Submitted ThinkPad ATA Password: Only 12 Bytes of SHA256 Hash as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIntel describe[1] SGX as a feature designed to "enable software vendors to deliver trusted[2] applications", where applications would "maintain confidentiality even when an attacker has physical control of the platform and can conduct direct attacks on memory". This already suggests the owner of the CPU isn't who they are protecting, but it gets worse (even before we consider the risk from AMT). Starting an SGX encl…
Comment linking /blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/
on “Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years”One lesser-known fact about laptop hard drive encryption (the kind that's built in to the SATA firmware) is that the passphrase used to encrypt the disk is often not the passphrase that you type in to the BIOS. On Lenovo laptops, for example, the passphrase is generated by a complex calculation that was only known to Lenovo until someone reverse-engineered it: https://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/03/lenovo-thinkpad-hdd-pas…
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/lenovo-thinkpad-hdd-password/
on “British authorities demand encryption keys in case with “huge implications””The hanshq.net story is just one of three blog entries that John Regehr linked to yesterday: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1242 The other two are: http://jbeekman.nl/blog/2015/01/nibble-sort/ http://belkadan.com/blog/2015/05/Nibblesort/
Comment linking /blog/2015/01/nibble-sort/
on “Nibble Sort”Today? It should be fairly easy to recover anything you want with a debugger, given sufficient time and effort. In future versions once SGX is available (>= Intel Skylake)? Good luck extracting data from an encrypted enclave. This is, after all, the intended purpose[1] for SGX - to create the "trusted computing" (DRM) that Microsoft has wanted for the last decade[2]. It's not like these new instructions are for the…
Comment linking /blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/
on “Firefox Users Can Now Watch Netflix HTML5 Video on Windows”Note that Intel signs [1] software which runs in SGX enclaves. Windows 10 uses [2][3] SGX. Intel got a pretty long patent on SGX a few years ago. In it, they say that the launch enclave will only issue launch tokens after ensuring that the enclave's author has a business agreement with Intel. The patent also states that they expect enclaves to be useful for DRM, so I'm guessing they want to insert themselves into th…
Comment linking /blog/2015/10/intel-has-full-control-over-sgx/
on “Intel Software Guard Extensions – Memory Encryption Engine”
