Mojo-V: Secret Computation for RISC-V

https://github.com/toddmaustin/mojo-v

by fork-bomber • 8 months ago

66 28 8 months ago

github.com

pjmlp• 8 months ago

And the relationship to Mojo programming language is?

shakna2• 8 months ago

This could be:

Great for security - Being able to safely compute secrets is a very difficult problem.

Fucking awful for security - More OEM secret controls and "analytics" that devolve into backdoors after someone yet again post keys online.

Manfred4• 8 months ago

The platform owner can manage keys and data contracts in the processor, that should enable them to rotate secrets constantly.

In other hardware there is an OEM secret because the manufacturer is trying to keep users out of "their hardware", in this case we're trying to keep everyone except the data owner out.

todd_austin5• 8 months ago

I created Mojo-V.

There's no back doors, but there's no integrity checking either, so a Mojo-V voting machine could take an encrypted vote and throw it away and add +1 to the attacker's favorite candidate.

A computational integrity checking mechanism will appear soon that will add a concise proof to every encrypted Mojo-V value, that will prove to the data owner that their requested computation was faithfully performed. And the mechanism also supports safe disclosures, too.

This should give data owners strong controls over what can be done with their data

shakna2• 8 months ago

By backdoor, I meant the capability to implement one.

The OEM looking for greater controls on their platform, would be considered the "data owner", here.

There's no real way to prevent that.

snvzz• 8 months ago

RISC-V is inevitable.

LarsDu88• 8 months ago

Was it really wise to name this Mojo when Chris Lattner, former Head 9f Engineering at SiFive also called his well funded programming language Mojo?

left-struck• 8 months ago

It’s called Mojo-V not just Mojo

craftkiller• 8 months ago

So close to Mojave, I feel like they could have done something with that.

NooneAtAll3• 8 months ago

was it really wise to name both Mojo when Mr.Evil stole it from Austin Powers back in 1999?

hyperhello• 8 months ago

Doctor Evil. He didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called Mister, thank you very much.

Manfred4• 8 months ago

After skimming through the documentation this seems like a nice solution, but I'm not sure if this is a problem we want to solve.

Consumers are finding out the issue with cloud computing when their heating system can't turn on because Cloudflare is down. A cheaper and more reliable solution is still on-premises computing.

Large social network and content platforms don't have any incentive to keep your data safe because they want to monitor and own everything.

Maybe this is for something like a government running a public service?

throawayonthe• 8 months ago

i want good confidential compute for cases where e2ee is impractical, like an email server or immich with server-side ml/processing etc

Manfred4• 8 months ago

Who are you protecting data access from in those cases? My suggestion was that it's probably more practical to run those kinds of solutions on a hardware stack you trust; in our basement or in a small box on the wall in your living room.

Besides, the specific extension we're talking about protect registers and computation and not shared memory.

nl2• 8 months ago

I'm not sure if this is a problem we want to solve

Who is this we you speak of?

I for one much prefer my cloud services and would love TEE I can control.

A cheaper and more reliable solution is still on-premises computing.

I assure you that my use of Cloudflare services ($0 in nearly 10 years) is much more reliable and much cheaper than hardware I run.

Manfred4• 8 months ago

I was genuinely asking, what cloud service do you use where trusted computing is essential for the core functionality of that service? What elements of the computational process do you not trust those services to perform for you?

My point about Cloudflare was more about them taking down essential services that could run just as well on-premises like a heating controller.

tromp2• 8 months ago

This should not (so much) be compared with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) but with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It is a very elegant and minimal way to implement TEEs, but suffers from the same drawbacks: a data owner has to trust the service provider to publish the public keys of actual properly constructed Mojo-V hardware rather than arbitrary public keys or public keys of maliciously constructed Mojo-V hardware.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment

api• 8 months ago

You could have the keys signed by a chip maker, which cuts the hosting provider out and reduces the trust surface to the manufacturer only. Unless your adversary is someone sophisticated enough to do surgery on chips.

It’s still not FHE but it’s about as good as you can get otherwise.

childintime• 8 months ago

Couldn't the keys be loaded once, in private write-only flash memory, by the user of the chip?

goku12• 8 months ago

Unless your adversary is someone sophisticated enough to do surgery on chips.

Since the threat assessment is important for deciding the strength of countermeasures, let me just add that this isn't as uncommon as you may believe. A company that I worked for had a decent capability to do this, and they were using it just to investigate the failures of electronic subsystems in their projects. Imagine what a more dedicated entity could achieve. This is why standards like FIPS 140-2/3 level-3/4 are very relevant in a significant number of corporate cases.

Talking about chip surgeries, I wish our distinguished expert Ken Shirrif could throw some light on the process. His work on legacy chips is one of the most noteworthy in the field.

todd_austin5• 8 months ago

I created Mojo-V

Yes exactly, because it is a privacy tech, the key/control channel tunnels through all software into the Mojo-V trusted H/W.

In the spec, I've been working on new Appendices comparing Mojo-V to TEEs, FHE, CHERI, and other high security tech. Mojo-V is a new thing, so absorbing it will take a while! :-)

I see it as a new design point between TEEs and FHE but much closer to FHE. TEEs are fast but they are not good at establishing trust with untrustworthy service providers, FHE is the ultimate in zero trust as all trust is in the math. Mojo-V eliminates all software, programmer, IT staff, attacker, malware trust with trusted hardware, and it runs near native speed.

And yeah, my mission is to snuggle as close to FHE as hardware can get!

technocrat8080• 8 months ago

To be clear, it's not a TEE replacement but does address one of the most common use cases of TEEs

todd_austin5• 8 months ago

I created Mojo-V.

For me, I see Mojo-V more like FHE than a TEE, for three primary reasons: 1) Like FHE, the tech is applied to variables and computation that doesn't touch protected variables is not affected. TEEs protect processes. 2) Like FHE, Mojo-V lacks software, timing, and microarchitectural side channels. TEEs are riddled with side channels. 3) Like FHE, no trust is extended to software because it cannot see the data it is processing. TEEs require that clients trust that the attested software has their best interests in mind.

Public key signing is like SGX, the vendor signs the public to certify that it is from real Mojo-V hardware.

Mojo-V: Secret Computation for RISC-V

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