Project Zero

Regardless of the punishment of Bolsonaro, I think there's something more important to be discussed here.

Brazil's Congress has passed laws determining that e-voting machines would have to print an anonymous proof of your vote, that is displayed to you behind a sealed acrylic viewport, so you can visually confirm it's casting your vote correctly, and then after you press CONFIRM one last time the paper is deposited in a sealead container attached to the voting machine for future inspection by all the political parties.

Like this, we would have the best of both worlds: fast vote counting on election day due to e-voting, but an anonymous paper record that could be audited in the following months by all political parties.

I used LAWS in plural for a reason; our CONGRESS has passed not one, but TWO laws imposing this measure:

1) Law 12034/2009

2) Law 13165/2015

If you don't believe me, just Google them.

What is amazing is that these two laws were deemed inconstitucional by our Supreme Court (?!). See [2].

So, in a democratic country with a functioning congress, the people's representatives have spoken at least twice that they wanted the paper trail attached to our e-voting machines, for auditing purposes.

Brazil's Congress is formed by 513 congressman + 81 senate members.

Regardless of that, our Supreme Court (11 seats) has deemed that these laws should not be put into place. Twice.

I find it also amazing that in 2009, the German Supreme Court decided the exact…

This deal isn't about security, it's about data.

Google already have one of the best security teams in the industry - Project Zero [0]. They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security.

This deal is about DATA. Wiz, as a cybersecurity vendor, have full remote access to their customers cloud compute storage (EC2 EBS volumes, etc) in the name of "security scanning" - this is actually part of their unique selling point - "agent-less scanning" which is unlike traditional security tools that require an agent installed in the OS. Instead, Wiz is able to just clone your full data volume and scan it locally in their cloud accounts/VPC.

With this deal Google has bought a ton of confidential data from Wiz's customers without their explicit knowledge or approval, and they will use it to improve Google's AI models like Gemini and probably several other products.

A year ago Google struck a $60M/yr deal with Reddit to exclusively license their content [1] for the same reason, and that data is probably much smaller and less valuable than the data Wiz has access to from their customers, which include companies like Morgan Stanley, DocuSign, Slack, Plaid, and others. [2]

Sources:

0: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com

1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/

2: https://www.wiz.io/customers

C is a subset of C++. The key point is that both languages suffer from the same problems, e.g. memory safety issues, undefined behavior, data races.

The software industry has been dealing with the fallout of these issues for the past three decades. It's about time we moved the bar higher.

By the way, the main data structure of my first large Rust program was simply a vector of a custom struct, optimized for memory footprint. Just like in C, with the same low overhead serialization.

With C, you always have to be careful to not overrun a buffer. The recent NSS vulnerability is a great example of this:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/this-shouldnt-have-happened.html

Even though this code was heavily fuzzed and tested, the problem slipped through. Not possible in Rust. Also, with Rust you can throw away all your sanitizer infrastructure and save all the associated costs.

Compartmentalization might make chaining the exploit more difficult, but it's certainly not unheard of. There have been exploit chains in the past that manage to jump from the baseband to the main CPU, for example.

One of my favorite exploits [0] was from Project Zero where the chain began with a vulnerability in the Apple wireless stack (Broadcom? maybe, but that might be a different exploit I'm thinking of), and ended in arbitrary kernel RCE. In other words, it was "a wormable radio-proximity exploit which allows me to gain complete control over any iPhone in my vicinity."

More relevantly to your question, here's a writeup about exploiting a GPU. [1]

[0] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/12/an-ios-zero-click-radio-proximity.html?m=1

[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/attacking-qualcomm-adreno-gpu.html?m=1

Don't have to look far as to why indeed.

Reading Pegasus[0] about Nso groups 0 click exploits used against any dissident journalists in regimes like Morocco, saudi arabia, (was on khashoggi and his partners phones), mexico, france, everywhere. the only thing protecting any of us is those with enough money to purchase software like pegasus don't deem us worthy of the license fee.

Soon as anyone rises above that fee your phone is basically live reporting to anyone with enough money. Doesn't lead to a restful nights sleep that book. They fricken built a turing machine out of pdf interpreter components to escape the encapsulation/vm for incoming files.[1]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59808055

[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero-click.html?m=1

Do you use a modern browser? If so, you use a piece of software that has been exploited many times by attacks in the wild. Those attacks were mostly targeting either a phone OS or Windows or macOS - not because there is anything in desktop Linux that would defend against those attacks, but because it is less popular. Perhaps some attacks did target desktop Linux; it’s hard to tell because few in-the-wild attacks are publicly documented in detail (although Project Zero has a spreadsheet of bugs known to have been exploited in the wild [1]). Regardless, at best you are relying on security by obscurity. And that’s despite the fact that modern browsers already have built-in sandboxing; without it the situation is worse.

[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/p/0day.html?m=1