Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 18, 2021 8:52 PM

@ Humdee, ALL,

You might find this a little cute,

https://mobile.twitter.com/Martina/status/1472340878211653636/photo/1

Clive Robinson • December 19, 2021 8:49 AM

@ Leon Theremin, ALL,

US Blacklists Dozens of Chinese Biotech Firms

Be wary of what the US claims, especially when the companies are more advanced then the US equivalents.

There is a war in progress with regards economics and especially Patents. The US due to stupidity in corporate structures is being out classed by amongst others China who have invested in research.

Thus when you see,

“biotechnology and other U.S. innovations”

What it generally means is that the US is trying to “claw ground back” that it has lost some years ago.

The US got bold after they forced the Chinese Telecomes company ZTE to close down with claims of ties to Chinese Military and The Chinese government… But the MSN etc forget to mention that the same claims can be lodged of very many US Companies on stronger evidence…

But look at it from another angle, if the Chinese Military/Government was supporting these companies, why did ZTE effectively fold? If there was such a “tie up” as the US has claimed then they would much as the US has done repeatedly in the past keep the company afloat, rather than just let it sink.

Look a little deeper, the plan is to stop these companies staying in business as they out compeate US corporate syructures that kick back to US Military and Government individuals…

US courts have made it abundantly clear that as far as patents go they will side with US Corps each and every time. So much so that eveb US Judges started calling out other US courts for their behaviours…

For instance much of the 5G nondense, is very much that, the purpose is to try and use US market leverage to kill 5G and GSM in general and force in “US 6G” on which every handset manufactured would have to pay royalties, on top of every chip inside also having to pay royalties and then there is software royalties as well.

It’s a major exercise in “rent seeking” pushed in by “Might is Right” type behaviours by various US Entities…

As I said “it’s war” but not in a way you are familiar with, but almost certainly more deadly in the long run…

Clive Robinson • December 19, 2021 6:41 PM

@ Winter,

The booster most definitely will help

Yes and so will becoming infected with a very mild dose such as omicron appears to be.

The difference from an individuals perspective is,

A booster shot is very narrow in it’s coverage in order to get it’s high specificity to a single viral feature. If the virus mutates more than just a very small amount then it’s potentially worse than usless.

A mild infection tends to cause a broad range response in the immune system. Thus it has a wider range response.

The SARS2 virus is mutating away from the “booster shot” high specificity which is why omicron has such a high reinfection rate. In South Africa they have seen not just “double infections” but “tripple” and in one case “quad” infections in a very short time period with vaccinated people.

So it’s clear that for a mutation of SARS2 to be successful as omicron is, it has to be “novel to the immune system”. That objective is much easier if the immune system has a high specificity to a single viral feature. Hence omicron is obviously “vaccine avoident” to get it’s “breakthrough” and turn old varient immune hosts into new varient susceptable hosts.

We’ve had this “vaccine avoident” discussion before with the Brazillian VoC’s where in some places reinfection was around 50%.

It’s a safe assumption that omicron will mutate very soon, if it has not done so already. If it mutates further away from vaccine specificity then it will out compeate omicron in the vaccinated.

There is no reason at all to suppose that an omicron mutation will be less pathogenic in fact the opposit is more likely on probability.

So unless they make booster shots that have shifted specificity to broaden out peoples immune systems they will have increasing probability of get infected with a new varient.

So having established the fact that booster shots of a very narrow specificity –which the mRNA vaccines are– are increasingly very less effective we have to ask how do we get broad characteristic immunity?

Well the answer is,

1, New vaccines not old.
2, Getting infected by a mutation.

We don’t have the first because there is no financial incentive for the drugs companies to do so as long as they are getting “full fee” on increasingly usless booster shots. In fact the very opposit is true, their financial interests are not to make a new vaccine as repeated uses of the old vaccine, means shorter immunity intervals, so more frequent jabs, say three or four every year.

The second option thus becomes the more sensible opption if the pathiogenic properties of the virus are low. Because you get a much broader immune spectrum, meaning the next varient –and there very definately will be one– you will be partially immune to.

We know this already from “pet owners” that have higher immunity to all SARS2 varients so far, and are frequently asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic as they have got partial immunity from their pets having had other corona virus infections.

So my viewpoint is to look at the benifit risk ratio of having an omicron infection to get broader immunity than having to be endlessly jabed every three months with an increasingly ineffective vaccine.

One of the reasons I did not like mRNA vaccines was their very very high specificity. It’s what makes mRNA treatment against cancers so desirable, but of little use against rapidly mutating viruses which can ably dodge mRNA bullets, but not the vide area blast effect of old fashioned vaccine “nuking”.

Clive Robinson • December 20, 2021 12:13 AM

@ Ted,

Do you know anything about this?

Which bit of it?

There are reasons it’s secretive, a bit more than the bland “an exploit becomes valuless once known”.

But the “finding exploits and selling them is not illegal” is not quite true… Yes it’s true as a statment of fact, providing you own the systems and software you investigate, and the country you are in does not have stupid legislation like the DMCA.

What is not legal in a lot of cases is “payment” read,

“They can do it tax-free, they don’t have to worry about Argentina’s inflation problems, they don’t have to – this isn’t taxable income”

Look at it this way you might find one realy good exploit in half a decade, that’s worth the top price of $1million. Now if you declair it as income, most places you will loose half of it to the countries taxation and banking systems.

There are other ways to be paid and legitimize it.

The first step is to get payed not in money or financial instruments that devalue faster than a brick dropping down a well, but in actual assets that appreciate and earn rent in some way. Wash the asset and pay yourself modestly from the rent in some way, like being a “graphic designer” or “web developer” or some such where the supposed work you do is darn near intangible. That way the $1million will keep you comfortable for the rest of your life. Plus if you make your “web development” a company you get to buy hardware and software as “tax deductable” and you can slide a whole lot else in like a company vehicle and even commestables like much of your household stuff from bleach, toilet paper, soap, through to food and even electronics etc. Even furniture if you have an office with reception etc.

Have a look at was going on in the UK before they brought in the “IR 35 rules”,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35

The other thing to consider is “the life style”

The south of South America is a lovely place not just visit but live. You can have a very good lifestyle for a fraction of what it costs in North America.

Somebody I know has a family and lives out there, and has their own mountain side and valley they bought for a lot lot less than my house cost me. They pay other people to farm it for them by the usual crop sharing / tennent farmer etc way of doing things. Whilst it appears an idilic life, it has all sorts of disadvantages, like lack of higher education for their children and health care etc. Not that that is realy any different to North America, but it’s a bit of a shock to many Europeans.

So if you are “young and smart” you can do very well for yourself in South America, as long as you don’t attract attention from corrupt officials and their very close friends of criminals.

Thus they would tend to form “closed social groups” where not even girlfreinds or wives know what they do for a living.

I’m not surprised they give journalists a very wide clearence. Because for all journalists witter on about protecting their “confidential sources” there job is in effect to “sell them out”. That is directly through what they write, “bringing an individual to life” or indirectly because journalists are very visable lightning rods for authority.

I stopped talking to them back in the early 1980’s when one of them decided to try to set me up… It was only my sixth sense that kept me out of trouble. Robert Schifreen and Steve Gold who I both knew back then were not so lucky, because they tried to be “responsible” when authority wanted blood and evisceration,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schifreen

I only found out the details a little while back but then UK Prime Minister “mad maggie” Thatcher wanted my head… She did not know me and might not have known my name, but she knew I’d potentially upset her plans. But simply she was trying to sell off what we now call BT, for as much money as possible. What she did not need was some smart arse kid pointing out BT’s high tech BT Gold Email and other digital services were compleatly insecure, as it badly effected share price as the BBC Micro Live program demonstrated, see the “hacking incident” section,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Live

(the details given in the page are not exactly accurate to put it mildly, but is “now the truth” as far as joirnalists and others have made it…)

There was a lot more behind the story that BT was trying to keep quiet in their splurges to the Press. So I wrote a story with evidence about how BT were lying to the press and put it in a “Closed ‘Editors’ Group” on BT Prestel where quite a few “in the scene” read it… A journalist notified a guy cald David Babsky who was the Editor for EMAP who owned Micronet800 that was run on part of Prestel. He reported it “up the chain” faster than a rat with a rocket up it’s jacksy… He was also the guy who set Robert and Steve up a little while later…

I’ve written about it previously with more details,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/04/smart_tv_hack_v.html/#comment-298750

Clive Robinson • December 20, 2021 6:37 AM

@ Gerard van Vooren,

Corona is roughly the same as a flue

Two things to note, firstly the Corona virus is the same species as “the common cold” in humans and many “Gastro intestinal infections” in animals, not the influenza virus (easy mistake to make as they are commanly “lumped together” as “seasonal respiratory desieses”, and one that has happened here on more than one occasion).

Secondly you’ve hit the wrong button in the spell checker, it happens to the best of us (me more than others due to my “fat fingers” and little phone screen).

It should be “flu” not “flue”. The latter is what smoke and combustion fumes rise in, and many incorrectly call a “chimney” (the chimney is the structure that supports one or more flues, when flues are free standing they are generally called “flue pipes”).

Clive Robinson • December 21, 2021 2:50 AM

@ Winter, ALL,

Speaking of XKCD, this “Incident Report” one made my “long for the old days”,

https://xkcd.com/2553/

Some of my “Incident reports” have events in nano-seconds, which is about the time it takes light to travel from the top to bottom of a sheet of A4 paper…

Or more accurately in the case of the reports in question,

“The time it takes an EMP pulse to reach a voltage that will take out the input devices on most commercial SDR receivers that do not have front end protection, even those in the $5000 range”…

Clive Robinson • December 22, 2021 7:23 AM

@ Gerard van Vooren, ALL,

Their philosophy is simple. Each half year you get a new update and after one year the code is obsolete.

Which on the face of it is ok for a “user” computer but not a “server” (I know of Solaris boxes still runing “8” just sitting in corners doing “infrastructure stuff”).

But there is another altogether more scary asspect.

As people will find the switch from Win10 to Win11 will do two things for them,

1, Obsolete perfrctly good hardware.
2, Drastically reduce their privacy.

So such an update process whilst desirable when organised correctly, in the wrong –mainly commercial– hands it’s a security disaster waiting to happen.

But as I said about Microsoft and the networks stack having “no love” the same applies to their kernel and most other “base system” components.

This was demonstrated when a certain worm took the UK NHS and many other systems down… Microsoft knew about it and had a patch for Win7 and Win 8 at the time but not “available” for XP. The NHS was stuck on XP because of two reasons,

1, Medical “equipment” used it and could not be upgraded due to “certification”.
2, Government would not fund hardware upgrades or extended software “ransom” Microsoft demanded.

There is another side of this issue of “equipment” and “certification” it’s not just medical equipment…

Just on of very many is “Industrial Control Systems”(ICS), plant equipment is generaly designed for a life of atleast 10years and 50years is not unknown, in the Petro-Chem industry there is plant equipment that is still in use that was put in place as an emergancy during late WWII and the start of the cold war a few years later… That “8 inch floppy disk” story about the nuclear launch codes system is not the only one by a lot of country miles. There is still “Valve/Tube” equipment in place even today for “good reasons” (EMP protection being just one).

Back in times a long long time ago, I designed an “Intrindically Safe”(IS), “Remote Telemetry Unit”(RTU) for use in the Petrom-Chem industry. It was bassed around CMOS components and would take either the 8088 or 8086 MIL spec 40 PIN Ceramic chips with on board links to change the external data buss to 8 or 16 bit depending on your requirments[1]. As far as I am aware they are still in use at certain oil fields that are of “critical importance” to not just that nations National Security, but the US National Security as well due to a critical dependency relationship… The company I worked for is still in business, and they still advertise the IS RTU as being for sale[2]…

But, even older… I still out of –call it friendship– support software I wrote for the Apple ][ back in the 1980’s… I’ve been hoping that the old hardware that is still running ICS equipment would have died and let me off the hook as it were… But no, “Retro is back” and people have very new shiny equipment that is in effect 100% compatible but better… As one of my old “customers” son’s who now runs his fathers business said, after his son bought some kit to play with, “It’s fantastic, your software runs just fine on it and it works with the plant”… So I’m now supporting “three human generations” and whilst my beard is not as white as snow, I do feel like Santa sometimes.

I’ve spent over 40years as a “working engineer” in fact early last year I passed 45 years since my “first sale” to a customer… I hope to make 50years atleast. The interesting thing is what I learnt back then is still very relevant today… But things I learned just a few years ago are not… It’s a problem because engineers are nolonger being taught “fundamentals” because that is “not what managment want” they want “tool jockeys” not “engineers” and Universities have switched their teaching to “suit the job market” not what “employees realy need”. Thus many courses these days are,

“Like the sprinkle of chocolate on the foam of your coffee”

They get left as a smear on the side, as they have no depth no foundation. Most managment do not realise that what they realy need, is not the visable cosmetic chocolate that has no depth, but the realy strong good stuff towards the bottom, that realy does the job 😉

We see job adverts for “full stack” it makes me laugh in a sad ironic way. I know one or two engineers who are way way more “full stack” than those who call themselves “full stack developers” ever could or probably ever will be.

I had reason to chat with one of them just last week, and we dropped into a little “rag chew” as you sometimes do and we were “chewing the fat” about recent industry news. I mentioned the NSO exploit and how some “experts” were “Oh wow” over it and the fact some one coded up a Turing Engine in an exploit… He found it funny as well[3].

[1] It also introduced me to my first “stepping bug” that left teeth marks. The Intel “data book” I was using said one thing about a Dual port parallel IO chip, which turned out to be untrue for the production chips. Basically the ports were supposed to be independent of each other turns out that they were not. So when you changed a particular function such as port direction it effected both ports…

[2] Where they get the parts from I’ve no idea… Do you remember the story about a decade before the “Space Shuttle” stopped flying that NASA was buying up old computer parts for the “on board systems” well I know for a fact that it’s the same “chips” they were doing a “Desperately seeking…” mission on.

[3] I should mention that we had both worked down at and well below the “Register Transfer Logic”(RTL) level which sits under “microcode” and what is described incorrectly by some as “microprograms”[4], because they are stored in ROM. Which should immediately tell you, “you need something to run it”, which is where “state machines” come into the picture.

[4] Due to Compiler designers stealing the RTL TLA[5] for what they call “Register Transfer Language”, what was RTL is kind of described as “microprograms” –of “horizontal microinstructions”– for microcode… Which misses much of what is involved and possibly the root cause of the nasty hardware bugs such as Meltdown. Whilst the horizontal microinstructions do change “logic control lines” some one still has to design the “state machines” and similer, that actually “run” those horizontal microinstructions…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode

[5] Due to a shortage of usable “Three Letter Acronyms”(TLAs) the TLA RTL has been reused multiple times. One still very much involved with computing is even older than “Register Transfer Logic”… It is “Resistor Transistor Logic” which is used to make “logic gates” and wad used in the likes of the PDP 8 and earlier computer systems back in the 1960’s and earlier.

In fact in the 1970’s you could by logic moduals called “Norbits” that looked like very large DIL/DIP chips, that had RTL inside. They were available from the likes of Mullard (later taken over by Philips) untill the late 1980’s some were designed by engineers working in “Mullard House” in Torrington Place in central London. Although I’ve not worked up there for some time (last was for stuff at UCL nearly two decades ago) as far as I am aware the building is still there. As for Norbits, you will probably never see them “in the flesh” unless you are decommisioning “old plant”, but…,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AsK0k5Vb8H8

Not only will you see one such device, if you watch the flip through of the datasheet the last page shows the RTL circuit diagram.

Oh and you were not supposed to wire wrap to the Norbit pins… That was a very big “no no”. Because they were not designed for it and they were “too soft” to make a reliable longterm connection for wire wrap, but would because of their softness make a very reliable long term connection with a socket. If anyone want’s an explanation as to why, just ask, or have a look back on this blog, where I explained it to @ Nick P and others when pointing out most plugs and sockets were guarenteed for only 50 insertions and removals, hence you should not keep plugging USB “devices” into PCB mounted USB Sockets. An issue that few do not realise about with their mobile phones and USB chargers…

Clive Robinson • December 22, 2021 4:46 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

Q: What phone book contains names, ages and phone numbers of only elderly persons?

Well there is an obvious answer,

Both Google and Facebook,

1, Scrape or synthesize demographic information from individual users.

2, Incrrasingly require phone numbers for “two factor” etc.

3, Sell user data to other organisations to create bespoke marketing databases for campaigns.

If you think about it the UK sold for £1 the entire UK NHS health database to US organisation Palantir, they specialise in building databases from other databases especially ones that some claim –very incorrectly– have been anonymized.

Palantir are by no means the only organisation that does this.

Clive Robinson • December 22, 2021 6:16 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, Winter, ALL,

There is no interaction. There is no reflection. It is just a one way dump onto a developing mind.

This argument comes up over and over in “common man sociology” and politicians just love it to use as an excuse for “policy” which is basically just “hatred of the masses and bigotry clothed in psycho-bable”.

For instance it’s been used for years in England to “wage war” on single mothers.

When people with actual training in science methods look into it they find there is actually nothing wrong with “single mothers”. The problem is actually society, in particular driven by power hierarchies.

There is an expression “it takes a village” the reality is, it is the contact a child has with others that determins much of their later life. That is the “society it is brought up in”. We see this in actual villages where the death of a father is common due to occupation, such as “fishing vilages”. The orphans generally grow up normall because the society they live in treats them as members not outcasts.

The psychopaths that climb hierarchies and seek power, frequently work by causing segregation a “them an us” thus members of society and the nessecary “outcasts”.

Why are the “outcasts” necessary, well they are for those climbing psychopaths to use to cover their failings, by getting society to hate the outcasts society is diverted away from the truth of what is going on.

The important thing is outcasts have to be “obvious” in some way so that even the most stupid of “useful idiots” that can not even make it as lowest of “guard labour” will know who to throw stones at.

Therefore “political social policy” is actually about not just division but ensuring segregation thus easy recognition and thus making people into “lightening rods”.

Certainly in the UK first the Church and then the politicians have used “obvious status” to make “outcasts”.

But it was only with the start of what we might call “the middle class” that first the church around three centuries ago and politicians about a century and a half ago started the war on “single mothers”.

Why, because the middle classes had “disposable income” and that is what the Church and later politicians wanted. Since before medieval times it was customary for the “landed” to give back part of what they raised by tithes (1/10th tax on production not profit) back to society via “alms to the church”. The theory was that the monks and nuns had taken a biding vow that had as a minimum three components you find as “the pillars” in all religions,

1, Faith
2, Hope
3, Charity

From this comes obedience to the hierarchy (Faith), unreasoned belief in deity justice (Hope) and poverty and tireless work for the hierarchy (Charity).

The work or “administration” was to Church lands and ensuring fealty to both the church hierarchy and the power of the landed hierarchy or “lords and masters”. Thus were the commoners tied to the land as surfs and beholdent on “lord and church” for their very survival.

As long as the young were tied to the land by fealty the lord cared not a jot for the status of marriage of his serfs any more than he did his live stock like cattle. The church only cared when they were expected to “pick up the bill” of those that could not work.

Thus single women with children were easy targets… And it remained that way in the UK untill 1953, when a law that alowed unmarried women who were not virgins to be locked up as “insane” or “moral degenerates” was repealed. The fact most of those women were as a result of “sexual abuse” was of no relevance to the law. It was also one of the reasons “shotgun” or “arranged” weddings of young women were not uncommon and “first born” to be shall we say “miracle babies” born as little as six months from the “wedding night”. Often the girl who would be under twenty was married off to an “established man” over fourty who might be a widower with children older than his bride who’s previous wife might well have died in child birth…

Preying on girls around 11years old was considered “acceptable” untill the 1850’s and beyond with girls as young as six being “sold” to be raised “for a gentleman” to “take into his care” when older. Other girls were “put into service” in houses as “maids” where the “gentleman of the house” might indulge himself. With unfortunate girls being thrown out or even sold “into trade”…

Such was the result of transition from feudal lords to Dickensian middle classes. Which happend with the shift from an agrarian to industrial economy where having workers tied to the land became of no advantage, just an expense. What will happen when we move very much more to an information economy, I can only guess at, but one thing is highly probable, the number of “outcasts” will grow and society will increasingly strip them of the means to live. Thus they will become very much more compliant to those who have control of fundemental assets such as housing and emoloyment. A basic feedback mechanism will occure at a certain point when we “hard switch” back to a new “feudal lord” system but this time tied to a “rent seeking” model rather than a “tied and tithed” model.

In short children learn from their environment, change the environment and they become different people. That is much of your life’s outcomes are decided not by nature, but nurture of the society you are in. Very much so if you are under 11 years but a continuing process untill you become an adult around a decade to a decade and a half later finally tailing off when you are around 35. So the desire of those that see themselves as “being in charge” will try to force society to their needs. Which is basically what you see happening in the US when you look in from outside, likewise China but aiming for a different model.

Clive Robinson • December 23, 2021 4:15 AM

@ null clam,

The history of APRS is long but other things are longer.

Back a long time ago before CMOS Z80 CPU’s I was involved with the design of what later became known as TNC’s.

Back then one of the most international networks was X25, it had gateways to many services including the Grandad of the lot the “Telex Network” these are things you don’t here about any longer.

A guy called Phil Karn (Call sign KA9Q) came up with AX25 software that was later repurposed for IP. It was software that alowed MS-DOS 5 users to connect to what we now call the Internet, and later additions gave access to Windows 3.0 and thus the nascent World Wide Web that added pictures to wide area information services. Stuff that had been done by Archie, FTP, Gopher, WAIS and Z39.50.

The story about APRS is younger than all of that by several years… but it was a small part of my working life… It was actually considered “virtually dead” a few years back, but the fact that due to “HotSpots” and broadband Amateur Radio has become the new “last mile” for connectivity APRS has been given a new lease of life…

It might appear mad, but I can take a 2meter 144Mhz hand held radio up into the mountains in another country (Wales or Scotland) where there is no mobile phone service signal. Using an App on the otherwise usless mobile phone still send SMS messages via APRS and a gateway to people who do have a cell signal. I can also send images through another “Slow Scan Television”(SSTV) app as well, if push comes to shove, I have used “Low Earth Orbit”(LEO) satellites to communicate internationaly from a field in rural England.

Oh and the International Space Station (ISS) has both APRS and SSTV as part of it’s “ham shack” one of the less well known things is that all US astronauts are “strongly encouraged” to become licenced Amateurs and many chat with school children and the like from Space in the little down time they get when in the ISS. You ask some recent astronauts how they became first interested in space and you will find Amateur Radio demonstrations to satellites etc in schools fired their imaginations.

Many thought Amateur Radio was a hobby now reserved for the retired and something to be made fun of in Comedy Shows[1]. But supprising to many it’s got a new lease of life by data communications using the Internet as a “no charge” backbone and being in reach for young experimenters.

It’s an odd hobby and has been for a century or more from the earliest days of radio. It keeps getting “written off” by pundits yet it still remains. I’ve held a licence for a long time I’m in my fifth decade of opperating I got it originally so I could experiment “leagaly” and it gave me a life long profession as has my hobby interest in computers and a few othe hobbies such as boat building.

Oh a word to the wise, don’t turn a hobby into a profession… I’ve done it several times, and whilst you get gainful employment, you have to find a new hobby and that gets harder and more expensive each time, and somehow less fun 🙁

[1] It used to be in a derisive way, but ABC’s “Last Man Standing” used it as a minor plot line arc, with the lead character having a “shack” in his “office” set. The show actually used real equipment and got it’s own call sign, and it was a great success in oh so many unexpected ways with many of the cast and crew getting their own licences. The shack had many “guest operators” running it week by week just before show aired and at other times. Even an international special event week was organised for the ending of the show.

https://nediv.arrl.org/2021/03/15/ka0xtt-last-man-standing-special-event/

Clive Robinson • December 23, 2021 7:55 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

The link says it all,

Yes, as does this one,

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/new-dell-bios-updates-cause-laptops-and-desktops-not-to-boot/

But it does not come close to describing the endless joy of,

“The fun in the Farm Yard.”

Down on “the floor” in,

“(AB)User Land.”

Ho hum, rather than Ho Ho, this winter solstice…

Clive Robinson • December 24, 2021 2:18 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

With regards “Dell BIOS update”,

Failing POST is pretty bad and like Blue Screen of Death that would normally be tested out in regression.

Yes, but back in the old “black arts” days when I used to play in that particular “sand pit” I knew that failures reported by POST were not accurate…

That is testing one thing could cause another test fail further down and POST would report the wrong failure.

The clasic example being a DRAM memory test that “over ran” into another area of memory and squelched something say in the battery backed SRAM or some IO peripheral chip registers. Back in the old AT ISA days the old “Poke to Die”[1] issue from Home Computers still existed… Where writing the wrong values in the wrong place would cause a real hardware failure, though usually not a “Magic Smoke”[2] one.

These days electronics are inexpensive so “hardware protection” “lockouts” get built in often “on chip”… But “cheapo designers” still abound, thus some use the inductor in a “Pi Low Pass” EMC filter as a fuse which as it’s frequently a “Surface Mount Device”(SMD) can be a B’tch to not just find but replace.

So my first thoughts would normally be “software overwriting device register” issue. But you would expect rather more in any particular product range.

Which brings us to “Grey Market” component issues. I won’t go into the issues just ask people if they remember all the fun when FTDI used Microsoft to “upgrade” their FT-232R USB to Serial port driver[3] and peoples hardware got bricked? I will say it happens way way more often than you might think as there is billions of dollars to be made in counterfeit components, and why I don’t by components off of e-bay and especially Amazon where it happens so often you would think they are in on the scams.

But if not “grey market” issues what next to illuminate…

As @SpaceLifeForm has a habit of saying “Silicon Turtles”, implying some body has been very naughty…

Well it happens, certain people in Russia earn a living by re-writting the Flash ROM in “System on a Chip”(Soc) devices in “thumb drives” and “memory cards” to make them look like they have larger capacity or are faster devices.

I used to chat on this blog with @Nick P about the dangers of “Hidden Flash ROM” and wrote in depth about “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dummers Day trip to London” from GCHQ to the sub basment of The Guardian back in the fun and games immediately following the Ed Snowden revelations. Where they ground down chips on Apple motherboards. The Guardian did a double page photo of one of the motherboards and as I pointed out at the time, it was a trove of what we would now call “Open Source Intelligence”(OSint).

It is folks why I still use 1995 and earlier PC’s as they had no FROM, @Nick P and I disagreed on dates. He thought 2005 was an acceptable cut off point bassed on what was known at the time, me I was rather more cautious for reasons I was aware of (that became clear in BadBIOS and Lenovo’s dirty little Malware trick). As it turns out another “itch” I’d had due to work I’d done on “Dual Pentium” systems was actually a “festering boil” relatrd to Meltdown etc going back befor 2005 chip steps.

But there is also “Ring -3, the ring that owns them all” or Intel’s “oh so secret” on CPU chip “Managment Engine”(ME) that allegedly “Put’s Linux Inside”…

It is possible that Intel “Microcode Patches” may be the root cause of the problem, it would not be the first time. It could be that some of the Dell computers have different “chip steps” to others thus different microcode patches.

Then we come to the murky question of DRM, and what may or may not be in that “chip”. It may be that someone has hidden a “super-key” in it, various people have talked about the possability in the past since there were first talks about “The Fritz Chip” when “The Senetor for Disney” as he was called for a DRM chip to be fitted by law… Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon and said it would protect against all malware etc… Well we know how that came out… Wikipedia used to have a “Fritz-Chip” page with all the gory details but they have been pursuaded to remove it all and now it points to this inane page,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

Where the “history section” has been not just sanitized, it’s been lobotomized, in line with a heavily “political biased re-write of history”…

What I do know for a fact is that the “On chip TRNG” on the ones I’ve looked at I most certainly “DO NOT TRUST”. I know some people think I’m paranoid about on chip TRNGs but as they are “The root of all trust” if they fail and they do way more often than people realise then it’s “by by security” as various countries National ID cards have shown…

Then there are a whole heap of other “Targeted Person of Interest” issues… There are two basic ways you can get spyware on a computer,

1, Direct targeting.
2, Fire and Forget targeting.

If you are a Level III attacker you generally have the resources to directly target a Person of Interest, as Journalists and maby others are discovering.

However there are others hidden behind defences even the most well funded of State SigInt agencies can not directly target.

Some years ago I did research on how to get malware on voting machines I described part of it on this blog as “fire and forget” (a small part of which was later named “air gap crossing”). Some time later news of Stuxnet hit the world, proving if it were needed that “Fire and Forget” worked. But just about everybody jumped to the wrong conclusion even though the evidence was their clear to see, and I’d highlighted it on this blog and said who the real target was “the hermit kingdom” of North Korea (which the US finally admitted). And more importantly why.

Fire and forget targeting is simple to describe but as with all “worm attacks” it can be hard to get right.

What you need is some unique or nearly unique identifier that applies to the Person of Interest, that triggers the payload of your spyware. And a wide area replication or infection mechanism.

You launch your spyware at a point hopefully close to a route to your Person of Interest. As the spyware jumps from machine to machine it checks the unique identifier. And does one of two things,

1, If matched deploy the payload.
2, If not, mark the machine to show it has been looked at and move on to all the machines it has contact with.

Step 1 if you get the identifier right only happens on a very very limited number of machines and hopefully one belongs to your Person of Interest. If you get it wrong then lots of machines launch the payload and suddenly you have a strong signal above the noise that gets noticed. Which is what happend with Stuxnet.

Step 2 is a “cascade” or “chain reaction” deployment system, and just as dangerous as it sounds. The original “Bob Morris Worm” got the replication rate wrong by a small amount, and it brought the then small Internet down catastrophicaly. But importantly for spyware loading on difficult to reach machines the Morris Worm did reach virtually every Host it was possible to. So if you keep the replication rate under control so it does not create a strong signal then the chances are good your target will be found.

That’s why I thought it up for attacking voting machines. We do know that “service techs” connect their laptops to voting machines to check them. So if you get the malware onto service tech machines given a little time sufficient voting machines will be infected. In practice, a Russian or Chinese SigInt agency could put the worm on the Internet in A Patagonian Internet Cafe, and within a relatively short period of time all the voting machine “service techs” laptops in the US will be infected and sometime after that so will be enough of the voting machines…

The most well known example of this Fire and Forget payload release mechanism being in use is Malware such as Ransomware from Russia. The difference is they use it the other way around. They look for anything that indicates the computer is in use in Russia like the keyboard, screen or language identifiers in the OS “Internationalisation Information” if it looks like it’s Russian then they don’t deploy, that way they keep “Putin&Co” off of their backs.

What went wrong with Stuxnet and why it got noticed was the targeting was a little to broad and it started showing up in AV reports from the Middle East(ME) and from the Far East(FE). Which would have been highly improbable for malware that was not targeted in some way. The ME cluster pointed to Iran, and knowledge that Iran and North Korea had both been customers of A Q Khan’s little “buy the bomb kit” enterprise and were co-operating explained the FE cluster. Throw in the known “Hermit Kingdom” behaviour and what was going on was fairly obvious and I called it as such. But even though North Korea realised it as well and called the US out via UN inspectors being not just surprised but shocked, people still believed the “bullcrap narative” then being put out by the US Gov and ICTsec companies “on the pay role”.

So could this be another “Fire and Forget” getting accidently revealed, “yes it could”. But… we don’t yet have enough information to be even close to making a determination on that.

So I can’t “rule it in”, but I’m certainly NOT “ruling it out”. That is it’s moved up my list as other more likely causes are seen as less likely.

I hope that aids other peoples thinking.

[1] Oddly I was explaining this just the other day on this blog. Back in the old 8bit CPU “Home Computer”(HC) days in the 1980’s when your choice of high level languages was BASIC or very rarely Forth hard built in. To get to assembler to do fast screen addressing you had to use in BASIC the POKE instruction over which there was no protection. Smart people used a small amount of instructions to “load a loader” that put a small assembler sub in by POKEs that then ran and pulled further assembler out of a BASIC array of some kind (even what looked like a mangaled PRINT string). The problem was hardware was expensive and back then storage was by audio tones onto audio casset tape which was slower than that famous tar drop experiment… To get higher speeds and better control one HC manufacturer built a casset mechanism into their HC. To get the motor to go forwards or backwards as was needed. It was driven electrically by a “bridge circuit” that was in turn driven by an 8bit latch, “in the memory map”. There was no “wrong value” hardware lock out so if your software put the wrong value into the memory location of the latch you put a short across the power supply, which could mean “magic smoke”[2] time. This issue still existed on some badly designed “Personal Computer”(PC) I/O cards both the many different 8bit bus cards for HCs and PC’s like Apples and the first IPM’d and later 16bit cards especially those for the IBM PC AT ISA bus.

[2] The meaning of “Magic Smoke” is actually derived from an insult, by one set of engineers to other engineers they considered not technically competent. It implies “witch doctor” fakery where a flash and smoke was “powerful magic at work” to impress rubes. Or in the case of electrical circuits a component had been “over stressed” in some way and if you were unlucky, you got to sing that old Platters favourit “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as the “components soul drifted up towards the heavens”… Actually the most frequent failures, it’s not technically “smoke” from “combustion” but from a micro “Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion”(BLEVE) in “wet electrolytic” capacitors, but that would take to long to explain so Wikipedia for the “finger” save 😉

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_liquid_expanding_vapor_explosion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_capacitor

[3] I don’t need to explain it when “The Vulture that bites…” does a reasonable job,

https://www.theregister.com/2014/10/24/ftdi_bricking_driver_response/

Clive Robinson • December 24, 2021 6:39 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

So “Fritz-chip 2.0” –AKA UEFI– strikes…

As they say “What the frack were they on…” over in Redmond.

The only was Micro$haft could have accessed a noy yet released BIOS upgrade,from Dell, is if dell gave them a “test upgrade”. Such things are supposed to be strongly quarantined to stop such things happening…

But we all know who the users of “Bricked Dells” will blaim… And not the real culprits.

Clive Robinson • December 25, 2021 1:31 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Was laughing so hard I started coughing

Perhaps something a little more seasonal and from gentler times, when some of us were younger, and others just a twinkle,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4HxM2frJGHk

Oh and of course,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_6SaqVQSw

Clive Robinson • December 27, 2021 7:37 AM

@ null clam, SpaceLifeForm,

You mean, Captain Nemo will come back for his squids and octopi ?

Only if he’s a fossil 😉

The Spiral Chambered Nautilus AKA Nautilus pompilius, is one of those species that has been hanging around for a while. From memory their oldest fossils are found in sedimentary rock in the Philippines and go back atleast as far as the early pleistocene. They are weired looking creatures that kind of look like cooked prawns only cream coloured not bright pink. They don’t have tenticals in the way we normally think of them –ie with suckers– and it has way more upto eighty if memory serves.

Whilst people claim the shells are examplrs of the “golden number” all I can say is “not the ones I’ve measured”. The growth is as a percentage increase thus follows a power law (effectively exponential). The last time I had an interest in them must be four decades ago, they have been used in jewelry and similar, and the techniques used to mount them are often exquisite examples of a white smiths craft, and tell us quite abit about our industrial history.

On another asspect that might or might not be of interest, I don’t know if they are edible or not… But when you look into their feeding habits you might decided it sounds too risky if not outright dangerous… They have two chemical sensors near their “pin-hole” eyes and it is said “they’ll eat anything if it stinks”. But it gets worse… They “store food” for quite a long time in a “crop”. The chances are that it is also likely to have quite a bit of extra in there to give you food poisoning or worse…

Clive Robinson • December 28, 2021 12:34 AM

@ lurker, SpaceLifeForm,

Usually in such contexts may means might if they feel so inclined…

If it ever meets at all for anything other than “administration” of it’s existance.

As some have realised “politics” is a “browny points” game. Where valuless to the giver titles and awards are handed out to those who use them to establish “perceived status” or “pecking order”. It’s part of “The King Game” of handing out titles but not land or other items of real value or any actual power.

Think of it as the kindergarten teacher making some one the “board wiping monitor” or “workbook collector monitor” or some such. The teacher in reality gets the better end of the deal by a very long way. That is the “minions” scurry away to do the teachers biding. You see the same trick pulled by “paid managers” in charge of “charity workers”, the best of whom can make “virtual serfs” out of some people. Think about those women who used to decorate churches with flowers, run little fund raising committees etc… Nearly all such “charity work” was not for the benifit of “the community” but the Priest and above in the hierarchy…

It’s just a sad “long con” game. I learnt how to manipulate people that way when quite young, and realised it was not just unethical, it was immoral bordering on criminal abuse. Especially when employers do it to gullible employees.