OpenTitan at One Year: the Open Source Journey to Secure Silicon

Posted by Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan Lead, Google 


During the past year, OpenTitan has grown tremendously as an open source project and is on track to provide transparent, trustworthy, and cost-free security to the broader silicon ecosystem. OpenTitan, the industry’s first open source silicon root of trust, has rapidly increased engineering contributions, added critical new partners, selected our first tapeout target, and published a comprehensive logical security model for the OpenTitan silicon, among other accomplishments.

OpenTitan by the Numbers 
OpenTitan has doubled many metrics in the year since our public launch: in design size, verification testing, software test suites, documentation, and unique collaborators at least. Crucially, this growth has been both in the design verification collateral required for high volume production-quality silicon, as well as the digital design itself, a first for any open source silicon project.
  • More than doubled the number of commits at launch: from 2,500 to over 6,100 (across OpenTitan and the Ibex RISC-V core sub-project).
  • Grew to over 141K lines of code (LOC) of System Verilog digital design and verification.
  • Added 13 new IP blocks to grow to a total to 29 distinct hardware units.
  • Implemented 14 Device Interface Functions (DIFs) for a total 15 KLOC of C11 source code and 8 KLOC of test software.
  • Increased our design verification suite to over 66,000 lines of test code for all IP blocks.
  • Expanded documentation to over 35,000 lines of Markdown.
  • Accepted contributions from 52 new unique contributors, bringing our total to 100.
  • Increased community presence as shown by an aggregate of over 1,200 Github stars between OpenTitan and Ibex.

One year of OpenTitan and Ibex growth on GitHub: the total number of commits grew from 2,500 to over 6,100.


High quality development is one of OpenTitan’s core principles. Besides our many style guides, we require thorough documentation and design verification for each IP block. Each piece of hardware starts with auto-generated documentation to ensure consistency between documentation and design, along with extensive, progressively improving, design verification as it advances through the OpenTitan hardware stages to reach tapeout readiness.

One year of growth in Design Verification: from 30,000 to over 65,000 lines of testing source code. Each color represents design verification for an individual IP block.


Innovating for Open Silicon Development

Besides writing code, we have made significant advances in developing processes and security framework for high quality, secure open source silicon development. Design success is not just measured by the hardware, highly functional software and a firm contract between the two, with well-defined interfaces and well-understood behavior, play an important role.
OpenTitan’s hardware-software contract is realized by our DIF methodology, yet another way in which we ensure hardware IP quality. DIFs are a form of hardware-software co-design and the basis of our chip-level design verification testing infrastructure. Each OpenTitan IP block requires a style guide-compliant DIF, and this year we implemented 14 DIFs for a total 15 KLOC of C11 source code and 8 KLOC of tests.
We also reached a major milestone by publishing an open Security Model for a silicon root of trust, an industry first. This comprehensive guidance demonstrates how OpenTitan provides the core security properties required of a secure root of trust. It covers provisioning, secure boot, device identity, and attestation, and our ownership transfer mechanism, among other topics.
Expanding the OpenTitan Ecosystem 
Besides engineering effort and methodology development, the OpenTitan coalition added two new Steering Committee members in support of lowRISC as an open source not-for-profit organization. Seagate, a leader in storage technology, and Giesecke and Devrient Mobile Security, a major producer of certified secure systems. We also chartered our Technical Committee to steer technical development of the project. Technical Committee members are drawn from across our organizational and individual contributors, approving 9 technical RFCs and adding 11 new project committers this past year. 
On the strength of the OpenTitan open source project’s engineering progress, we are excited to announce today that Nuvoton and Google are collaborating on the first discrete OpenTitan silicon product. Much like the Linux kernel is itself not a complete operating system, OpenTitan’s open source design must be instantiated in a larger, complete piece of silicon. We look forward to sharing more on the industry’s first open source root of trust silicon tapeout in the coming months.
Onward to 2021
OpenTitan’s future is bright, and as a project it fully demonstrates the potential for open source design to enable collaboration across disparate, geographically far flung teams and organizations, to enhance security through transparency, and enable innovation in the open. We could not do this without our committed project partners and supporters, to whom we owe all this progress: Giesecke and Devrient Mobile Security, Western Digital, Seagate, the lowRISC CIC, Nuvoton, ETH Zürich, and many independent contributors.
Interested in contributing to the industry’s first open source silicon root of trust? Contact us here.

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Google patches four high‑severity flaws in Chrome

The new release patches a total of eight vulnerabilities affecting the desktop versions of the popular browser.

The post Google patches four high‑severity flaws in Chrome appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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Improving open source security during the Google summer internship program

Posted by the Information Security Engineering team at Google 


Every summer, Google’s Information Security Engineering (ISE) team hosts a number of interns who work on impactful projects to help improve security at Google. This year was no different—well, actually it was a little bit different because internships went virtual. But our dedication to security was still front and center as our intern team worked on improvements in open source software.

Open source software is the foundation of many modern software products. Over the years, developers increasingly have relied on reusable open source components for their applications. It is paramount that these open source components are secure and reliable. 
The focus of this year’s intern projects reflects ISE’s general approach of tackling security issues at scale, and can be split into three main areas: 
  • Vulnerability research: Finding new vulnerabilities, developing infrastructure to search for known bug classes at scale, and experimenting with new detection approaches.
  • Mitigation and hardening: Developing hardening approaches with the goal of fully eliminating specific vulnerability classes or mitigating their impact.
  • Security education: Sharing knowledge to increase awareness among developers and to help train security engineers.
Vulnerability research
Fuzzing is a highly effective method of uncovering memory-corruption vulnerabilities in C and C++ applications. With OSS-Fuzz, Google provides a platform for fuzzing open source software. One of this year’s intern projects ported internal fuzz targets to OSS-Fuzz, which led to the discovery of new bugs. In this context, our interns experimented with setting up fuzzing for difficult fuzz targets such as the state machines of Memcached and Redis. Additionally, they added new fuzzers for complicated targets like nginx, PostgreSQL, and Envoy, a widely used cloud-native high-performance proxy. 
State-of-the-art fuzzing frameworks like AFL, libFuzzer, and Honggfuzz leverage feedback such as code coverage to guide the fuzzer. Recent academic papers suggest that symbolic execution can complement existing fuzzing frameworks to find bugs that are difficult for random mutation-based fuzzers to find. Our interns evaluated the possibility of using KLEE to augment libFuzzer and AFL. In particular, they found that adding KLEE to existing fuzzing frameworks provides benefits for fuzz targets such as sqlite and lcms. However, at this point in time, there is still work to be done before symbolic execution can be performed at scale (e.g., in OSS-Fuzz).
In addition to finding memory-corruption vulnerabilities, fuzzing can help find logic vulnerabilities. This can be difficult as it requires understanding the semantics of the target application. One approach uses differential testing to find different behaviors in applications that are supposed to behave in the same way. One of our intern projects this summer looked into leveraging differential fuzzing to expose logic vulnerabilities and found a number of cases where YAML parsers handle edge cases differently.
Other intern projects this summer focused on the search for application-specific vulnerabilities. Our interns aimed to discover common Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) misconfigurations. The recently launched GKE-Auditor, created by one of our interns, implements 18 detectors to find misconfigurations in Node isolation, role-based access control, and pod security policies. Another project implemented regression tests for the Google Compute Engine (GCE) metadata server. 
Finally, one intern project looked into improving Visual Studio Code (VSCode), a popular cross-platform code editor that is based on Electron which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime. VSCode can be vulnerable to DOM cross-site scripting attacks. For this reason, our intern’s work centered on making VSCode Trusted Types-compliant by using and contributing to the static and dynamic analysis tools to find violations. This work not only led to an improvement of VSCode, but also of Chromium.
Hardening 
Because finding all vulnerabilities is an impossible task, we always look for ways to mitigate their impact or eliminate certain vulnerability classes completely. The main focus of this year’s hardening projects were to enable security enhancements for major web frameworks and to provide sandboxing for popular libraries written in memory-unsafe languages such as C and C++.
In an effort to make the web more secure, our intern team added security enhancements including Content Security Policy (CSP), Fetch Metadata Request Headers, Cross-Origin Opener Policy (COOP), and Cross-Origin Embedder Policy (COEP) to a number of existing web frameworks (our previous post provides a good overview of these mitigations).
As a result, these web security features were implemented in a number of common application frameworks, including Apache Struts [CSP, COOP/COEP], Apache Wicket [Fetch Metadata, COOP/COEP], .NET Core [CSP], Django [Trusted Types, COOP], and WordPress [Fetch Metadata, CSP]. We’re looking forward to working with open source maintainers to further develop and integrate these defenses into more popular frameworks!
Sandboxing 
Executing native code that comes from untrusted origins or processes data from untrusted sources is risky because it may be malicious or contain vulnerabilities. Sandboxing mitigates these risks by executing code in a low-privileged environment.This process often requires modifying the interfaces of third-party libraries and setting up their execution environment. Sandboxed API is a framework to help with these tasks that is used at Google. 
Our interns also worked on providing reusable sandboxes for popular open source libraries such as curl, OpenJPEG, LoadPNG, LibUV, and libTIFF. Now, anyone who wants to use these libraries to process untrusted data can do so safely.
Education
Capture the flag (CTF) competitions are useful for transferring security knowledge and training security engineers. The kCTF project provides a Kubernetes-based infrastructure which offers a hardened environment to securely deploy CTF tasks and isolate them from each other. One intern project added a number of improvements to the documentation including enabling a version control to allow multiple authors to work on one challenge and simplifingkCTF’s usage.
We would like to thank all of our interns for their hard work this summer! For more information on the Google internship program and other student opportunities, check out careers.google.com/students.

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Fostering research on new web security threats

Posted by Artur Janc and terjanq, Information Security Engineers 


The web is an ecosystem built on openness and composability. It is an excellent platform for building capable applications, and it powers thousands of services created and maintained by engineers at Google that are depended on by billions of users. However, the web’s open design also allows unrelated applications to sometimes interact with each other in ways which may undermine the platform’s security guarantees.

Increasingly, security issues discovered in modern web applications hinge upon the misuse of long-standing web platform behaviors, allowing unsavory sites to reveal information about the user or their data in other web applications. This class of issues, broadly referred to as cross-site leaks (XS-Leaks), poses interesting challenges for security engineers and web browser developers due to a diversity of attacks and the complexity of building comprehensive defenses.
To promote a better understanding of these issues and protect the web from them, today marks the launch of the XS-Leaks wiki—an open knowledge base to which the security community is invited to participate, and where researchers can share information about new attacks and defenses.

The XS-Leaks wiki 
Available at xsleaks.dev (code on GitHub), the wiki explains the principles behind cross-site leaks, discusses common attacks, and proposes defense mechanisms aimed at mitigating these attacks. The wiki is composed of smaller articles that showcase the details of each cross-site leak, their implications, proof-of-concept code to help demonstrate the issue, and effective defenses. 
To improve the state of web security, we’re inviting the security community to work with us on expanding the XS-Leaks wiki with information about new offensive and defensive techniques.

Defenses 
An important goal of the wiki is to help web developers understand the defense mechanisms offered by web browsers that can comprehensively protect their web applications from various kinds of cross-site leaks. 
Each attack described in the wiki is accompanied by an overview of security features which can thwart or mitigate it; the wiki aims to provide actionable guidance to assist developers in the adoption of new browser security features such as Fetch Metadata Request Headers, Cross-Origin Opener Policy, Cross-Origin Resource Policy, and SameSite cookies.
The Security Team at Google has benefited from over a decade of productive collaboration with security experts and browser engineers to improve the security of the web platform. We hope this new resource encourages further research into creative attacks and robust defenses for a major class of web security threats. We’re excited to work together with the community to continue making the web safer for all users.

Special thanks to Manuel Sousa for starting the wiki as part of his internship project at Google, and to the contributors to the xsleaks GitHub repository for their original research in this area.

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Cybersecurity Advent Calendar: Let Santa in, keep hackers out!

Santa will soon come down the chimney, but there are potential entry points into your home and digital life that you should never leave open

The post Cybersecurity Advent Calendar: Let Santa in, keep hackers out! appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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iPhone hack allowed device takeover via Wi‑Fi

Using a zero-click exploit, an attacker could have taken complete control of any iPhone within Wi-Fi range in seconds

The post iPhone hack allowed device takeover via Wi‑Fi appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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Cybersecurity Trends 2021: Staying secure in uncertain times

ESET experts look back at some of the key themes that defined the cybersecurity landscape in the year that’s ending and give their takes on what to expect in 2021

The post Cybersecurity Trends 2021: Staying secure in uncertain times appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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Turla Crutch: Keeping the “back door” open

ESET researchers discover a new backdoor used by Turla to exfiltrate stolen documents to Dropbox

The post Turla Crutch: Keeping the “back door” open appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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Cyberattackers could trick scientists into producing dangerous substances

Without ever setting foot in the lab, a threat actor could dupe DNA researchers into creating pathogens, according to a study describing “an end-to-end cyber-biological attack”

The post Cyberattackers could trick scientists into producing dangerous substances appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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Mobile payment apps: How to stay safe when paying with your phone

Are mobile payments and digital wallets safe? Are the apps safer than credit cards? What are the main risks? Here’s what to know.

The post Mobile payment apps: How to stay safe when paying with your phone appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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