[Cryptography] Dark Mail Alliance specs?

Ralf Senderek crypto at senderek.ie
Sat Mar 29 08:22:38 EDT 2014



On Sat, 29 Mar 2014, Bear wrote:

> By being the owner of the machine, with physical access, ability to
> reboot as needed, ability to emulate in software if that facilitates
> my attack, etc. The machine user is nowhere around to make sure that
> he's actually getting the running dedicated server he paid for, and
> as the machine owner I can fix it so absolutely every packet he gets
> is indistinguishable from what he'd get if he were. No evidence means
> no crime.

I very much doubt that. An attacker with physical access reboots my
server in order to compromise it. That's possible, I cannot prevent
that. But for instance I can send heartbeats through an encrypted
tunnel between another server I control and my dedicated server in
the data center.

While my server reboots for being compromised the magical software
emulation must create encrypted packets without having the key.
So I can _detect_ the (possible) malicious act even when it happens
and not only after my compromised system returns after reboot.

I don't say it's easy to secure a server, but it's certainly not
impossible to detect a compromise, so there is no "absence of effective
technical means to secure something" in special cases that involve
the cloud.

          --ralf



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