OpenSparc -- the open source chip (except for the crypto parts)

[Jon Callas]

On May 6, 2008, at 1:14 AM, James A. Donald wrote:

> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> > What you can't do, full stop, is
>> > know that there are no unexpected security related behaviors in the
>> > hardware or software. That's just not possible.
>
> Ben Laurie wrote:
>> Rice's theorem says you can't _always_ solve this problem. It says  
>> nothing about figuring out special cases.
>
> True, but the propensity of large teams of experts to issue horribly  
> flawed protocols, and for the flaws in those protocols to go  
> undiscovered for many years, despite the fact that once discovered  
> they look glaringly obvious in retrospect, indicates that this  
> problem, though not provably always hard, is in practice quite hard.

Yes, but.

I tend to agree with Marcos, Ben, and others.

It is certainly true that detecting an evil actor is ultimately  
impossible because it's equivalent to a non-computable function. It  
doesn't matter whether that actor is a virus, an evil vm, evil  
hardware, or whatever.

That doesn't mean that you can't be successful at virus scanning or  
other forms of evil detection. People do that all the time.

Ben perhaps over-simplified by noting that a single gate isn't  
applicable to Rice's Theorem, but he pointed the way out. The way out  
is that you simply declare that if a problem doesn't halt before time  
T, or can't find a decision before T, you make an arbitrary decision.  
If you're optimistic, you just decide it's good. If you're  
pessimistic, you decide it's bad. You can even flip a coin.

These correspond to the adage I last heard from Dan Geer that you can  
make a secure system either by making it so simple you know it's  
secure, or so complex that no one can find an exploit.

So it is perfectly reasonable to turn a smart analyzer like Marcos on  
a system, and check in with him a week later. If he says, "Man, this  
thing is so hairy that I can't figure out which end us up," then  
perhaps it is a reasonable decision to just assume it's flawed.  
Perhaps you give him more time, but by observing the lack of a halt or  
the lack of a decision, you know something, and that feeds into your  
pessimism or optimism. Those are policies driven by the data. You just  
have to decide that no data is data.

The history of secure systems has plenty of examples of things that  
were so secure they were not useful, or so useful they were not  
secure. You can, for example, create a policy system that is not  
Turing-complete, and then on to being decideably secure. The problem  
is that people will want to do cool things with your system than it  
supports, so they will extend it. It's possible they'll extend it so  
it is more-or-less secure, but usable. It's likely they'll make it  
insecure, and decideably so.

	Jon


	Jon

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