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chapter-introduction/chapter.tex
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@ -8,6 +8,53 @@
\chaptertitle{Introduction}
\label{chapter-intro}
% New draft:
%
% Passionate statement about democracy and academic freedom
%
% We live in times of rising fascist and authoritarian sentiment worldwide. While computer science and cryptography are
% often portrayed as politically neutral technologies, their practice is a political act and can have grave real-world
% consequences.
% maybe: Within mathematics and computer science, the field of cryptography is unique in that it smainstream views
% link to cypherpunks, hackers
% Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are an example of such a political technology. The core function of HSMs is to
% protect cryptographic secrets against \emph{any} physical attack. Even though they are widely used in finance and
% business applications, in their design, they curiously embody the radical idiology of the cypherpunk and hacker
% movements.
%
% We believe physically secure devices like HSMs can be a keystone technology in the creation of secure systems for
% communication and computation in a free, democratic society. However, while current state-of-the art commercial
% devices can be expected to resist a fascist police force or even some authoritarian states' secret services, their
% physical security is still lacking due to misaligned ecosystem incentices. As Anderson put it,
% todo cite: betrusted
%
% FIXME: quote from anderson: Security economics remains a big soft spot, with security chips being in many
% ways a market for lemons. A banker buying HSMs probably won’t be aware of
% the huge gap between FIPS [US national HSM security standard] level 3 and level 4, and understand that level 3 can
% sometimes be defeated with a Swiss army knife. The buying incentive there is
% compliance, and where real security clashes with operations it’s not surprising
% to see weaker standards designed to make compliance easier. API security is
% too hard, and the difference between HSMs’ internal and external APIs makes
% it too confusing. The near-abdication of FIPS in favour of ISO 19790 and vari-
% ous protection profiles touted under the Common Criteria will confuse things
% further, as will the UK’s move away from the Criteria. Confusion marketing
% and liability games appear set to continue.
%
% Meanwhile in academia,
% In this thesis, we aim to significantly advance the field of hardware security module construction. We publish all
% designs, code and data as open source to create the groundwork for future research, and sow the seeds for a new
% generation of secure hardware that will be able to resist a rising tide of fascist and authoritarian movements.
%
%
%
% Research questions:
% 1. can hsm w/o proprietary mesh?
% 2. how do meshes look like in practice?
% 3. can we improve monitoring?
% 4. can we solve power transfer issue
% 5. applications
%
All Cops Are Bastards, or ACAB is a slogan popular in far left and anarchist circles since the mid-twentieth century
that expresses a rejection of state authority~\cite{constantinouAppliedResearchPolicing2021}. While politically, this
blanket rejection is a fringe viewpoint with no mainstream acceptance, there exists a parallel between this and modern
@ -77,25 +124,6 @@ thesis that progress from theory to practical deployment.
guarantee?
\end{enumerate}
% FIXME: quote from anderson: Security economics remains a big soft spot, with security chips being in many
% ways a market for lemons. A banker buying HSMs probably won’t be aware of
% the huge gap between FIPS level 3 and level 4, and understand that level 3 can
% sometimes be defeated with a Swiss army knife. The buying incentive there is
% compliance, and where real security clashes with operations it’s not surprising
% to see weaker standards designed to make compliance easier. API security is
% too hard, and the difference between HSMs’ internal and external APIs makes
% it too confusing. The near-abdication of FIPS in favour of ISO 19790 and vari-
% ous protection profiles touted under the Common Criteria will confuse things
% further, as will the UK’s move away from the Criteria. Confusion marketing
% and liability games appear set to continue. But does this matter?
% First, most of the HSM business is moving to the cloud, with Azure and AWS
% each having of the order of 2,000 HSMs, and Google playing catchup. Instead of
% having a few thousand banks each running a few, or a few dozen, HSMs we’ll
% have three companies running a few thousand. As the prices are driven down,
% the HSM vendor engineers’ expertise will be lost; and as the cloud service
% providers guard their datacentres, HSMs are likely to be replaced by crypto
% chips.
To answer our first research question, we propose the Inertial Hardware Security Module (IHSM), a new type of HSM that
extends the high level of protection offered by the modern cryptographic software stack down to the hardware level,
enabling secure computation in insecure places.