Nick M. Daly writes:

I've actually been reading similar concerns (about hardware-based tracking) on the FreedomBox list, and I have no basis for validating the claims. Wondering if anybody could shed some light on just how serious these claims are and how they'd impact Tor users (or privacy generally)? The mail seems full of generalizations, but the author seems genuine:

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2012-June/004049...

I find this message misleading in various ways. The basic thing that I've been telling people is that there are few situations in which either PSN or TPM uniqueness makes things qualitatively worse. There are lots of hardware unique IDs. On Linux, try "sudo lshw" and be surprised at all the things that have unique serial numbers. There are also things that are unique about your machine that are not hardware serial numbers, like filesystem serial numbers and observed combinations of software configurations. These can be bad for privacy because software can tell which computer it's running on. If the software has an adversarial relationship with you, it can then use that information in a way that you don't like. We would be better off in some regards if operating systems let us hide local uniqueness from software so that the software couldn't tell what machine it was running on, or set fake values for these unique identifiers. Some proprietary software including Microsoft Windows already makes a sophisticated profile of the local machine, including many kinds of observations, to tie a copy of the software (or an "activation") to a particular device (!). The only substantive difference with the TPM uniqueness is that the TPM uniqueness lets you prove (like a smartcard) to a remote system that you're running some software on the same machine as before. Even if the OS did let you set fake values when software tried to examine the system it was running on, the remote system could see that the TPM-related values were fake. That's useful for some applications, including but not limited to DRM-like ones. I've argued that this is bad in some ways, but at least you can still turn off the TPM. Then your system can't attempt to offer that kind of proof. As far as I know, turning off the TPM is pretty robust: it really is turned off. All of these things are anonymity problems in particular when some software on your computer is actively _trying_ to tell someone else what machine you're running on, either because it's programmed to do so or because someone has broken into your computer and installed spyware and is trying to use it to monitor you. If you're not in that situation, there is nothing especially magical about having unique hardware IDs in your machine, because everyone's machine has some uniqueness, and (for the most part) that uniqueness isn't part of standard network protocols like TCP/IP and doesn't automatically leak out to anyone and everyone you communicate with over the Internet. (There is a possible exception about clock skew, which you can read about in Steven Murdoch's paper from 2006.) Similarly, having a GPS receiver in your phone does not mean that everyone you send an SMS to or everyone you call will learn your exact physical location. However, it does mean that if there's spyware on your phone, that spyware is able to use the GPS to learn your location and leak it. If you're worried about spyware threats on your phone, which can be quite a realistic concern, the GPS itself isn't necessarily the unique core of the threat, because there are also lots of other things in the phone that can be read to help physically locate you (like wifi base station MAC addresses, taking photographs of your surroundings with the phone's camera, recording the identities and signal strengths of the GSM base stations your phone sees...). So a more fundamental question might be whether your phone operating system is able to either prevent you from getting malware or prevent the malware from accessing the sensors on your phone. In the case of a desktop PC, the hardware uniqueness is _there to be read by software_, and if it's in a TPM it _may be able to give the software remotely verifiable cryptographic proof that the software is really running on the machine containing that particular TPM_. In neither case does the hardware uniqueness directly broadcast itself to other machines, and in neither case does the hardware uniqueness prevent the operating system from preventing other software from reading it. If you do have some kind of software running on your machine that's trying to track you or trying to help other people track you, hardware uniqueness is one thing that the software might look at. But if you're a Tor user, a more basic thing for the software to try to do is make network connections to leak your real IP address in order to associate your Tor-based network activity with your non-Tor-based network activity. That might be even easier because the tracking software could just try to make a direct network connection. If you're not using Tor, at least not at a particular moment, but are still concerned about tracking, there's another problem, which is that all existing browsers _already_ reveal a great deal of software-based uniqueness to any interested web site, usually enough to make your browser unique. See https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf This is important because it doesn't require there to be any malicious software on your computer, just a traditional web browser. One of the defenses people have talked about against hardware fingerprinting is running inside a virtual machine. Normally, software inside the virtual machine, even if it's malicious, doesn't learn much about the physical machine that hosts the VM. If you always use Tor inside a VM, then even if there's a bug that lets someone take over your computer (or if they trick you into installing spyware), the malicious software won't be able to read much real uniqueness from the host hardware, unless there's also a bug in the VM software. Running in a VM isn't exactly a defense against software fingerprinting (like browser fingerprinting) if you use the VM for various non-Tor activities that you don't want to be linked to one another, because the software configuration inside the VM might be, or become, sufficiently different from others that it can be recognized. There's probably more research to be done about the conditions under which VMs can be uniquely identified both "from the inside" by malware, and remotely by remote software fingerprinting, absent VM bugs that give unintended access to the host. -- Seth Schoen <schoen@eff.org> Senior Staff Technologist https://www.eff.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/join 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 +1 415 436 9333 x107 _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE