[danpalmer]

Having seen the FIPS certification process happening for a popular brand of HSM (as an outside observer on the attack side), I’d put a fair bit of trust in these systems.

Very good isolation at all layers, formal verification, highly resistant to tampering, fuzzing, and so on. Every single part was locked down in a very thoughtful way.

There may be no legal liability with the purchase contracts, but these manufacturers certainly seem to approach the problem with the level of consideration that I’d hope for given the importance of the technology.

[Veserv]

Except they were discussing AWS which does not have FIPS certification. In fact, it has no third party certification of any security value, they did no first party verification, there are no public binding guarantees, and no private guarantees. There is nothing but Amazon’s marketing literature and wishful thinking backing the claims of its security. Amazon would never stand by the claim that it encourages people mindlessly propagate, that AWS provides the multi-level security actually required for general purpose shared tenancy as they are 100% incapable of delivering it and they know it.

[danpalmer]

Apologies I misread the criticism and thought Amazon had FIPS, but that people weren't happy with that.

It sounds like Amazon should be getting that! I wonder if perhaps it's just ill-suited to service providers, and only really workable for hardware.

[sudhirj]

I don’t think there’s any specs to certify against for hypervisors. Think other AWS offerings are FIPS certified, like the CloudHSM, but Enclaves is a different system and use case.

[Veserv]

There are no off the shelf specs you can certify against for hypervisors in particular. However, the certification of general purpose isolation in a shared tenancy environment is structurally similar to certification against the Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) [1] as done for INTEGRITY-178B [2].

Unfortunately certification against that standard directly is no longer possible in the normal course because as part of the security assurance requirement (SAR) AVA_VLA_EXP.4 it requires a NSA penetration test and evaluation that identifies no deficiences to cross-verify the proofs of correctness.

However, with the amount of money the US government is spending on AWS it should be trivial for them to get such a certification done if they were competent to actually do it. In addition, you could always just use a comparable standard that replaces AVA_VLA with the standard AVA_VAN which just validates against a “generic nation-state attacker” similar to what PikeOS [3] did. Given that PikeOS is made by a relatively small company, especially compared to something like Amazon or even the just the AWS division, it would again be easy for Amazon to demonstrate such capability if they were competent to do so.

Instead Amazon is 100% guaranteed to fail such a evaluation like how Microsoft failed their evaluations because, like Microsoft, nobody in their organization has ever designed, worked on, or probably even seen a actual high security system and they have no incentive to learn when they can just make up bullshit that people believe. Their organizations and management are structurally incapable of developing secure systems without a complete management and technology replacement.

[1] https://www.niap-ccevs.org/profile/Info.cfm?PPID=65&id=65

[2] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/epfiles/st_vid101...

[3] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/epfiles/1146a_pdf...