asciilifeform: the decompiler appears to be mostly worthless. and the tool runs only under mac os.
asciilifeform: copumpkin: yes. seemed like a joke (at least in comparison)
asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: the issue isn't whether one likes it, but whether any practical substitute (other than 'objdump' and 10-100x the time/sweat) exists.
asciilifeform: incidentally, very few products have a monopoly as total as that of 'ida.'
asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: 'ida hexray' is the only one i've ever seen that was actually usable for anything practical.
asciilifeform: many people write, e.g. a 'mips' (or other small instruction set) emulator and cross-compile for it. when you get hold of one of these, you can just extract the turd and disassemble using toolset for that cpu.
asciilifeform: Mats_cd03: crapware authors went lazy ages ago. most use none - or standard - packers. standard packer -> standard unpacker.
asciilifeform: actually i must admit that i am looking forward to these machines being produced, shipping, selling widely. because apparently there is only one way to educate people - let them piss on electric fence in person.
asciilifeform: Rassah: what do miners have to do with it ?
asciilifeform: Rassah: wait. you expect that your target market consists of people who would even contemplate buying a knockoff ?!!
asciilifeform: Rassah: so! product sold first. sources published - sometime, maybe - later. interesting.
asciilifeform: there is some typical 'confusion between the warm and the soft' here. the only bits that matter are entirely independent (in the statistical sense) ones.
asciilifeform: Rassah: there are not 8000 uncorrelated bits in there.
asciilifeform: Rassah: 'they are aware of most of these concerns' << and still did nothing. this, you realize, is an accusation of willful scammitude. not mere ignorance.
asciilifeform: Rassah: your friend has cemented my conclusion. i can figure out which cells are responsible for the device's output, merely by knowing your room temperature over time. and then all we have to do is run brute force over the narrowed set. (a few bits)
asciilifeform: Rassah: the skew we're talking about isn't rng output skew - the kind that can be addressed with von neuman's algo, etc. it's the actual physical effect you're using.
asciilifeform: Rassah: 'Skew shift is monotonic with respect to temperature. If an increase in temperature makes a neutral cell become 1-skewed, then decreasing the temperature will make that same cell 0-skewed.' << fixed bad paste
asciilifeform: Rassah: ergo: if i have a sufficiently precise graph of the temperature of your unit over time, i can infer something about the sram and which cells are responsible for the bulk of the input to rng.
asciilifeform: Rassah: K, of all cells that are neutral at 293 K. Note that the probability exceeds 0.04 at the highest points; these peaks are omitted to show the rest of the distribution with greater detail. See Section VI-B1 for discussion typically
asciilifeform: Rassah: 'Skew shift is monotonic with respect to temperature. If an increase in temperature makes a neutral cell become 1-skewed, then decreasing the temperature will Fig. 11: This contour shows the probability distribution at 273 K and 323
asciilifeform: Rassah: but all of this pales in comparison to another little observation. recall pg. 10 of the paper.
asciilifeform: Rassah: including, e.g. one that functions as an sram on all days but every 5th christmas.
asciilifeform: Rassah: atmel can replace your sram with whatever it likes.
asciilifeform: Rassah: it would have to be an electron micrograph. taken by somebody other than atmel.
asciilifeform: Rassah: note that you would need to know the actual physical layout of atmel's die, to draw this picture. do you?
asciilifeform: Rassah: not very interesting, i'm afraid. let's see the actual grid values - unprocessed.
asciilifeform: Rassah: consider the title of the paper. do you see any apparent contradiction?
asciilifeform: Rassah: we read the paper. (or at least, i did)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: comput von neumann of '0101010101'.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: von neumann of predictable bitstream is still predictable.
asciilifeform: Rassah: by what means do you 'collect the entropy' ?
asciilifeform: Rassah: as you can see - if you turn this into a bitstring by pure 'raster' scan, it will contain mostly zero.
asciilifeform: Rassah: this is approximately the kind of pattern you end up with using sram on powerup
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes. some people, somehow, think this adds 'entropy'
asciilifeform: Rassah: hashing as an attempt to 'distill' entropy.
asciilifeform: Rassah: ask him if whitening is used anywhere.
asciilifeform: Rassah: consider that you are now married to the physical characteristics of a particular model from particular vendor. e.g. next year atmel ships sram that's non-entropic down to -40. without bothering to tell you. or it is 'entropic', but actually picks up Voice of America.
asciilifeform: Rassah: my purpose isn't pedantry. try to apprehend: i buy your product, get a keychain-sized gizmo with a single chip. how do i verify that the package functions exactly as described?
asciilifeform: Rassah: 'we will be testing' >> how ?
asciilifeform: Rassah: then it doesn't matter what you did to plug in the random bits - they are smeared across the 'ciphertext' (if you will, the hash output) and can be inferred.
asciilifeform: Rassah: picture a thoroughly, obscenely broken hash.
asciilifeform: Rassah: 'we are physically reading it' << how do you know this? that is to say, if both the reader and the sram are on one ic die, how can you substitute, e.g. a fake sram that never flips bits, to test ?
asciilifeform: Rassah: do you actually believe that hashing can add (instead of subtracting) entropy?
asciilifeform: Rassah: because now your bits are... correlated.
asciilifeform: Rassah: why are you using whitening (hashing) in rng? and 'because everyone does' is not acceptable answer.☟︎
asciilifeform: /me 'we'll be using he Atmel provided SRAM' << has probably read enough.
asciilifeform: rc oscillators << you meant - 'thermometers'
asciilifeform: floating adc inputs << you mean local radio station receiver !
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: somebody had to crap out the physical unit.
asciilifeform: Rassah, mircea_popescu: then one last question, for if/when he does. value of adjacent sram cells is correlated. what, if anything, was done about this? (my guess - nothing but the usual 'whitening'.)
asciilifeform: Rassah: what, if anything, does your product do to verify that rng is actually functioning 'as rated' before bits are used in anger?
asciilifeform: Rassah: other question. in my own experiments, i found that sram powerup 'static' depends heavily on the die's temperature.
asciilifeform: Rassah: I think << you are not the designer of this item ?
asciilifeform: Rassah: generated only from SRAM << your code reads a standalone sram? or atmel claims to produce rng output this way inside a black box micro ?
asciilifeform: Rassah: what must one do to verify - without a shade of doubt, in personal laboratory - that your device works as described?
asciilifeform: this is the most riotously funny nsa turd yet.
asciilifeform: so now we see that these (likely same, but usg never commissions just one turd of a particular variety) idiots did indeed crap out something like a $1B version of 'ida hexray.'
asciilifeform: me: why would terrorist run ms-win. he: they will always, trust me.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: one of my first job interviews out of uni. telephone. a fellow from one of the giant gov. contractors was really intrigued that i know x86 asm., have reversed crud for money. i ask him 'what's the job'. he: automated reversing. me: of what. he: ever hear of karatsuba's algo? me: sure. bignum mult. him: well, we wanna find encryption softs on terrorist drives!☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: 'nevis... is a tool developed by NTAC to search disk images for possible Encryption products. CMA have further developed this tool to look for signs of Steganography'
asciilifeform: 'quincy... exploitation of seized media' << another mega-lol
asciilifeform: 'swamp donkey' << lol! apparently a usg version of 'cryptolocker'☟︎
asciilifeform: the 'ddos mpex' script is probably in there.
asciilifeform: ^ tldr: massive catalogue of usg... spam tools.
