# ROCA, TPM chips and Fast Primes

This issue affects IoT devices relying on TPMs for security. Especially those that are remote and hard to update using a firmware update.

ROCA: Return Of the Coppersmith Attack.

A ‘Fast Primes’ algo is used to generate primes, but since they are not uniformly distributed, one can use knowledge of the public keys to guess the private keys. Primality testing was discussed in this blog here.

From the full paper here:  Practical Factorization of Widely Used RSA Moduli

• All RSA primes (as well as the moduli) generated by the RSALib have the following form: p=k∗M+(65537^a modM). Because of this the public key, p*q is of the form 65537^c mod M.
• The integers k, a are unknown, and RSA primes differ only in their values of a and k for keys of the same size. The integer M is known and equal to some primorial M = Pn# (the product of the n successive primes) and is related to the size of the required key. The attack replaces this with a smaller M’ which still satisfies the above prime generation equation, enabling guessing of a.
• Coppersmith algorithm based RSA attacks are typically used in scenarios where we know partial information about the private key (or message) and we want to compute the rest. The given problem is solved in the three steps:

problem → f(x)≡0modp → g(x)=0 → x0

p is an unknown prime and x0 is a small root of the equation. Code based on SageMath (python) – https://github.com/mimoo/RSA-and-LLL-attacks/blob/master/coppersmith.sage

• The LLL is a fascinating algorithm which ‘reduces’ a lattice basis b0, · · · ,bn−1. The algorithm computes an alternative basis b0 ′ , · · · , bn-1′ of the lattice which is smaller than the original basis. Coppersmith’s algorithm utilizes the LLL algorithm.

Discussion of Coppersmith attack in “Twenty Years of Attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem”.

A statement by Infineon is here. A discussion on this appeared on crypto.stackexchange.com at https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/52292/what-is-fast-prime .

The vulnerability affects HP, Lenovo and Fujitsu which OEM Infineon TPMs. It also affected Gemalto IDPrime smartcards which used the Infineon library.

Unrelated to this but a wifi attack appeared around the same time.

# Ethereum Security and the DAO Solidity Attack

The basics of Ethereum are described in the Gavin Wood paper. A list of keywords in Solidity are described in this file from its source, which includes “address”, “contract”, “event”, “mapping” and “wei” ( 1 Eth= 10^18 Wei). This list does not include “gas”, which is a mechanism described in Wood’s paper to combat abuse. Interestingly the paper says “The first example of utilising the proof-of-work as a strong economic signal to secure a currency was by Vishnumurthy et al [2003]”, aka the Karma paper.

The karma paper talks about solving a cryptographic puzzle as enabling one to join the network and be assigned a bank set: “the node certifies that it completed this computation by encrypting challenges provided by its bank-set nodes with its private key. Thus each node is assigned an id beyond its immediate control, and acquires a public-private key pair that can be used in later stages of the protocol without having to rely on a public-key infrastructure”. Crypto puzzles for diverse problems have been proposed before, a survey and comparison is at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d8b9/a0309cef8c309541876c9c2c5ad5c16c3b7a.pdf

The DAO attack had 3 components, a hacker, a malicious contract and a vulnerable contract. The malicious contract is used to withdraw funds from the vulnerable contract so that it does not get a chance to decrement its balance. Oddly enough the gas mechanism which is supposed to limit computation did not kick in to stop this repeated remittance.

A few weeks before the DAO attack someone had pointed out to me that security of solidity was a bit of an open problem. My feeling was contracts should be layered above the value exchange mechanism, not built into it. Bitcoin based protocols with the simpler OP_RETURN semantics appeared more solid. Later around October’16 at an Ethereum meetup, Fred Ehrsam made the comment that most new projects would be using Ethereum instead of bitcoin. But Bitcoin meetups had more real-world use cases being discussed. The technical limitations exist, which are being addressed by forks such as SegWit2x this November. Today saw a number of interesting proposals with Ethereum, including Dharma, DataWaller and BloomIDs. Security would be a continuing  concern with the expanding scope of such projects.

# OCSP validation and OCSP stapling with letsencrypt

Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is a mechanism for browsers to check the validity of certificates presented by HTTPS websites. This guards against revoked certificates. This has been an issue for big websites, which had bad certs issued and had to be revoked. Google has stated its intent to begin distrusting Symantec certs in 2018. A counterpoint to Google appears in this interesting article which notes deficiencies in Chrome’s implementation of OCSP, and of privacy issue for the website visitors with OCSP checks.

Let’s look at what Mozilla is doing about this, as they have attempted to implement OCSCP correctly.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366100

Telemetry indicates that fetching OCSP results is an important cause of slowness in the first TLS handshake. Firefox is, today, the only major browser still fetching OCSP by default for DV certificates.

In Bug 1361201 we tried reducing the OCSP timeout to 1 second (based on CERT_VALIDATION_HTTP_REQUEST_SUCCEEDED_TIME), but that seems to have caused only a 2% improvement in SSL_TIME_UNTIL_HANDSHAKE_FINISHED.

This bug is to disable OCSP fetching for DV certificates. OCSP fetching should remain enabled for EV certificates.

OCSP stapling will remain fully functional. We encourage everyone to use OCSP stapling.

So they are moving away from OCSP to OSCP stapling. From wikipedia, “OCSP stapling, formally known as the TLS Certificate Status Request extension, is an alternative approach to the Online Certificate Status Protocol(OCSP) for checking the revocation status of X.509 digital certificates.[1] It allows the presenter of a certificate to bear the resource cost involved in providing OCSP responses by appending (“stapling”) a time-stamped OCSP response signed by the CA to the initial TLS handshake, eliminating the need for clients to contact the CA”

How to setup OCSP stapling with letsencrypt:

The CSR request can request OCSP_MUST_STAPLE option (PARAM_OCSP_MUST_STAPLE=”yes”). The issued cert will have the parameter  with OID 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.1.24 and an OCSP URI which are shown with

openssl x509 -in cert.pem -text  |grep 1.24

1.3.6.1.5.5.7.1.24:

openssl x509 -noout -ocsp_uri -in cert.pem

http://ocsp.int-x3.letsencrypt.org

This changes the cert itself that is issued, so independent of haproxy/nginx configuration that disables OCSP, the browser checks this cert and shows the error. Also this parameter is not shown in the safari/firefox on cert inspection, but shows up on command line as param 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.1.24 being present in the downloaded cert.

https://esham.io/2016/01/ocsp-stapling

1. Figure out which of the Let’s Encrypt certificates was used to sign your certificate.
3. Point nginx to this file as the “trusted certificate”.
4. In your nginx.conf file, add these directives to the same block that contains your other ssl directives:
ssl_stapling on;
ssl_stapling_verify on;
ssl_trusted_certificate ssl/chain.pem;

# Stabilizing Cryptocurrency

Before I forget it’s name, BaseCoin is a project that attempts to stabilize a cryptocurrency, so it does not have wild fluctuations.

Regular (Fiat) currencies are actively managed by Federal banks to be stable and are also stabilized by being the default currency for labor negotiations, employment contracts, retirement accounts etc which are slow moving changes.

More on crypto stabilization in this post – http://www.nadertheory.com/#!/main/articles/post-09-the-intelligent-cryptocurrency-investor .

# Decentralized Identity Based on Blockchain

Sovrin project. Uses a Permissioned blockchain which allows it to do away with mining as an incentive and instead directly build a Distributed Ledger Technology which stores Distributed Identifiers (DIDs) and maps them to claims. Removal of mining frees up resources and increases network throughput. Interesting Key Management aspects, including revocation. Contrasts with Ethereum uPort – which is permissionless and public. Neat design, but will face adoption problem as it is unhitched from bitcoin/ethereum.

DPKI – Distributed PKI. Attempts to do reduce the weakness of a centralized certificate authority as compromising that cert authority affects each of its issued certificates. This concept is built out and used in Sovrin. https://danubetech.com/download/dpki.pdf

Remme. Remember me. An approach to SSL based logins. Modifies SSL.
Used an EmerCoin implementation as mvp and Ethereum blockchain. EmerCoin: https://emercoin.com/content/EMCSSL.pdf . Adoption problem here is change in behavior of each browser and mobile app. https://medium.com/@alexandermomot/passwords-are-crap-6ed4e97bffa7

Sidechains. Original proposal was to free up resources for when trust is established, to reuse blockchain technology and to establish a two-way peg between the sidechain and the blockchain. https://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/32367/mining-on-pegged-side-chains

Coco Framework. https://github.com/Azure/coco-framework

HyperLedger – Linux based framework for developing blockchains software. Provides a DLT and uses Intel SGS extensions. (Intel+Microsoft+Linux foundation). Uses a replicated state machine model with each validating peer independently adding to its chain after reaching consensus on order of txns with other peers using Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance or Proof of Elapsed Time. https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2017/08/10/collaborating-with-microsoft-to-strengthen-enterprise-blockchains . Related – https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36844827/are-blocks-mined-in-hyperledger

# SHA-3 Hash Construction

Keccak (or SHA-3, a ‘qualified successor’ to SHA-2) is a hash function based on interesting and novel ideas and claims to be post-quantum sufficient or quantum resistant.

Some Keccak sponge-hash-function pointers:

A sponge function is a generalization of both a) hash functions, which have a fixed output length, and b) stream ciphers (=state cipher), which have a fixed input length.

Random sponge = Random permutation

The spongeconstruction:

First, the input string is padded with a reversible padding rule and cut into blocks of r bits. Then the b bits of the state are initialized to zero and the sponge construction proceeds in two phases:

• In the absorbing phase, the r-bit input blocks are XORed into the first r bits of the state, interleaved with applications of the function f, a fixed length permutation/transformation function function. When all input blocks are processed, the sponge construction switches to the squeezing phase.
• In the squeezing phase, the first r bits of the state are returned as output blocks, interleaved with applications of the function f. The number of output blocks is chosen at will by the user.

The last c bits of the state are never directly affected by the input blocks and are never output during the squeezing phase.”

https://keccak.team/keccak_specs_summary.html

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45158351/sha-3-in-python-implementation

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43063282/qcryptographichash-what-is-sha3-here-in-reality

What security does Keccak offer against quantum attacks, specifically Grover’s algorithm?

“SHA-3 was designed to be very efficient in hardware but is relatively slow in software. SHA-3 takes about double the time compared to SHA-2 to run in software and about a quarter of the time to run in hardware.” This makes it less suitable than SHA-2 for key stretching, at least against an attacker that is hardware equipped.

The advantage of SHA-3 is that a computationally-simpler SHA-3(key | data) can suffice as a MAC.”

# Linux Bridges and Firewalls for Containers

Hubs and Repeaters work on bits on Layer1. Bridges and Switches work on frames, the protocol data unit for Layer2. A Hub supports a star configuration – like a splitter it simply forwards traffic received on one segment to all the others. A Repeater amplifies signal for longer distances. A Bridge is a smarter type of Hub, usually implemented in software, which looks at the destination MAC address of the packet before forwarding to the segment with MAC matching that destination, thereby avoiding unnecessary network traffic on all the other segments. It does not look at IP addresses. A Switch is a reincarnation of a Bridge in hardware with several ports.  The basic operation of a Bridge/Switch is L2 forwarding, which includes ARL (Address Resolution Logic) table learning and ageing.  An L3 Router switches packets based on the IP address instead of the frame address.

A linux bridge from a VM to the Host, does not need an IP address, but it is a good idea if you want to talk to the host for management or set firewall rules on it.

To create a bridge br0 between two interfaces eth0 and eth1, one runs commands: brctl addbr br0, brctl stp br0 on, brctl addif br0 eth0, brctl addif br0 eth1.

Since a bridge is an L2 construct, how can one filter IP addresses with it. A quote: An Ethernet interface cannot usefully have an IP address if it is also attached to a bridge. However it is possible to achieve the same effect by binding an address to the bridge itself:

ifconfig br0 192.168.0.1

An example of firewall configuration on a bridge.

Troubleshooting bridges:

brctl showmacs br0

Docker creates a few bridges by default. A primer on Docker Container networking and the bridges it creates are here and  here. Here are three common ones.

bridge: docker0 bridge . This is the default, allowing all containers to talk to each other

host: container listens to host, without any isolation.

Some problems with host iptables rules reveal themselves in working with docker.

A look at firewalld, ebtables, ipset, nftables at https://www.slideshare.net/albertspijkers/red-hat-enterprise-linux-next-generation-firewall . The command line tools talk to the kernel over a netlink socket.

A more extensible approach is with Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF), the classical one now called cBPF, the extended successor called eBPF.   A very basic problem is filtering HTTP or DNS packets based on the destination hostname, rather than the IP address.  This is discussed in an example by Cloudflare here.

# NVidia Tiny Linux Kernel and TrustZone

The NVidia Tiny Linux Kernel (TLK), is 23K lines of BSD licensed code, which supports multi-threading, IPC and thread scheduling and implements TrustZone features of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It is based on the Little Kernel for embedded devices.

The TEE is an isolated environment that runs in parallel with an operating system, providing security. It is more secure than an OS and offers a higher level of functionality than a SE, using a hybrid approach that utilizes both hardware and software to protect data. Trusted applications running in a TEE have access to the full power of a device’s main processor and memory, while hardware isolation protects these from user installed apps running in a main operating system. Software and cryptographic isolation inside the TEE protect the trusted applications contained within from each other. A paper describing the separation with alternatives for virtualizing the TEE appeared at https://ipads.se.sjtu.edu.cn/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:vtz.pdf

TrustZone was developed by Trusted Foundations Software which was acquired by Gemalto. Giesecke & Devrient developed a rival implementation named Mobicore. In April 2012 ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient combined their TrustZone portfolios into a joint venture Trustonic, which was the first to qualify a GlobalPlatform-compliant TEE product in 2013.

A comparison with other hardware based security technologies is found here. Whereas a TPM is exclusively for security functions and does not have access to the CPU,  the TEE does have such access.

Attacks against TrustZone on Android are described in this blackhat talk. With a TEE exploit,  “avc_has_perm” can be modified to bypass SELinux for Android. By the way, Access Vectors in SELinux are described in this wonderful link. “avc_has_perm” is a function to check the AccessVectors allows permission.

# NVidia Volta GPU vs Google TPU

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) allows multiple hardware processors to act in parallel on a single array of data, allowing a divide and conquer approach to large computational tasks such as video frame rendering, image recognition, and various types of mathematical analysis including convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The GPU is typically placed on a larger chip which includes CPU(s) to direct data to the GPUs. This trend is making supercomputing tasks much cheaper than before .

Tesla_v100 is a System on Chip (SoC) which contains the Volta GPU which contains TensorCores, designed specifically for accelerating deep learning, by accelerating the matrix operation D = A*B+C, each input being a 4×4 matrix.  More on Volta at https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/inside-volta/ . It is helpful to read the architecture of the previous Pascal P100 chip which contains the GP100 GPU, described here – http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-specs/ .  Background on why NVidia builds chips this way (SIMD < SIMT < SMT) is here – http://yosefk.com/blog/simd-simt-smt-parallelism-in-nvidia-gpus.html .

Volta GV100 GPU = 6 GraphicsProcessingClusters x  7 TextureProcessingCluster/GraphicsProcessingCluster x 2 StreamingMultiprocessor/TextureProcessingCluster x (64 FP32Units +64 INT32Units + 32 FP64Units +8 TensorCoreUnits +4 TextureUnits)

The FP32 cores are referred to as CUDA cores, which means 84×64 = 5376 CUDA cores per Volta GPU. The Tesla V100 which is the first product (SoC) to use the Volta GPU uses only 80 of the 84 SMs, or 80×64=5120 cores. The frequency of the chip is 1.455Ghz. The Fused-Multiply-Add (FMA) instruction does a multiplication and addition in a single instruction (a*b+c), resulting in 2 FP operations per instruction, giving a FLOPS of 1.455*2*5120=14.9 Tera FLOPs due to the CUDA cores alone. The TensorCores do a 3d Multiply-and-Add with 7x4x4+4×4=128 FP ops/cycle, for a total of 1.455*80*8*128 = 120TFLOPS for deep learning apps.

3D matrix multiplication

The Volta GPU uses a 12nm manufacturing process, down from 16nm for Pascal. For comparison the Jetson TX1 claims 1TFLOPS and the TX2 twice that (or same performance with half the power of TX1). The VOLTA will be available on Azure, AWS and platforms such as Facebook.  Several applications in Amazon. MS Cognitive toolkit will use it.

For comparison, the Google TPU runs at 700Mhz, and is manufactured with a 28nm process. Instead of FP operations, it uses quantization to integers and a systolic array approach to minimize the watts per matrix multiplication, and optimizes for neural network calculations instead of more general GPU operations.  The TPU uses a design based on an array of 256×256 multiply-accumulate (MAC) units, resulting in 92 Tera Integer ops/second.

Given that NVidia is targeting additional use cases such as computer vision and graphics rendering along with neural network use cases, this approach would not make sense.

Miscellaneous conference notes:

Nvidia DGX-1. “Personal Supercomputer” for $69000 was announced. This contains eight Tesla_v100 accelerators connected over NVLink. Tesla. FHHL, Full Height, Half Length. Inferencing. Volta is ideal for inferencing, not just training. Also for data centers. Power and cooling use 40% of the datacenter. As AI data floods the data centers, Volta can replace 500 CPUswith 33 GPUs. Nvidia GPU cloud. Download the container of your choice. First hybrid deep learning cloud network. Nvidia.com/cloud . Private beta extended to gtc attendees. Containerization with GPU support. Host has the right NVidia driver. Docker from GPU cloud adapts to the host version. Single docker. Nvidiadocker tool to initialize the drivers. Moores law comes to an end. Need AI at the edge, far from the data center. Need it to be compact and cheap. Jetson board had a Tegra SoC chip which has 6cpus and a Pascal GPU. AWS Device Shadows vs GE Digital Twins. Different focus. Availabaility+connectivity vs operational efficiency. Manufacturing perspective vs operational perspective. Locomotive may be simulated when disconnected . DeepInstinct analysed malware data using convolutional neural networks on GPUs, to better detect malware and its variations. Omni.ai – deep learning for time series data to detect anomalous conditions on sensors on the field such as pressure in a gas pipeline. GANS applications to various problems – will be refined in next few years. GeForce 960 video card. Older but popular card for gamers, used the Maxwell GPU, which is older than Pascal GPU. Cooperative Groups in Cuda9. More on Cuda9. # Weeping Angel Remote Camera Monitor Sales of hardware camera blockers and similar devices should increase, with the Weeping Angel disclosure. Wikileaks detailed how the CIA and MI5 hacked Samsung TVs to silently monitor remote communications. Interesting to read for the level of technical detail: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/EXTENDING_User_Guide/EXTENDING_User_Guide.pdf . The attack was called ‘Weeping Angel’, a term borrowed from Doctor Who. Other such schemes are described at https://wikileaks.org/vault7/releases/#Weeping%20Angel , including a iPhone implant to get data from your phone – https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/NightSkies_v1_2_User_Guide/NightSkies_v1_2_User_Guide.pdf . # Golang interface ducktype and type assertion The interface{} type in Golang is like the duck type in python. If it walks like a duck, it’s a duck – the type is determined by an attribute of the variable. This duck typing support in python often leaves one searching for the actual type of the object that a function takes or returns; but with richer names, or a naming convention, one gets past this drawback. Golang tries to implement a more limited and stricter duck typing: the programmer can define the type of a variable as an interface{}, but when it comes time to determine the type of the duck, one must assert it explicitly. This is called type assertion. During type assertion the progream can receive an error indicating that there was a type mismatch. explicit ducktype creation example: var myVariableOfDuckType interface{} = “thisStringSetsMyVarToTypeString” var mySecondVarOfDuckType interface{} = 123 // sets type to int ducktype assertion getMystring, isOk := myVariableOfDuckType.(string) // isOk is true, assertion to string passed getMystring, isOk := mySecondVarOfDuckType.(string) // isOk is false, assertion to string failed In python, int(123) and int(“123”) both return 123. In Golang, int(mySecondVarOfDuckType) will not return 123, even though the value actually happens to be an int. It will instead return a “type assertion error”. cannot convert val (type interface {}) to type int: need type assertion This is very odd. The type here is interface, not int – the “int subtype” is held within the “interface type”. The concrete type can be printed with %T and can be used in a type assertion switch. GO Hello world – 3 types of declarations of an int package main import "fmt" func main() { i:=1 var j int j = 2 var k int = 5; fmt.Println("Hello, world.", i, j, k) }  GO Function call syntax package main import "fmt" func main() { first := 2 second := 3 firstDoubled, secondDoubled := doubleTwo(first, second) fmt.Println("Numbers: ", first, second) fmt.Println("Doubling: ", firstDoubled, secondDoubled) fmt.Println("Tripling: ", triple(first), triple(second)) } //function with named return variables func doubleTwo(a, b int) (aDoubled int, bDoubled int) { aDoubled = a * 2 bDoubled = b * 2 return } //function without named return variables func triple(a int) int { return (a * 3) }  # ICS Threat Landscape Kaspersky labs released a report on Industrial and Control System (ICS) security trends. The data was reported to be gathered using Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), a distributed antivirus network. https://ics-cert.kaspersky.com/reports/2017/03/28/threat-landscape-for-industrial-automation-systems-in-the-second-half-of-2016/ The rising trend is partly due to the isolation strategy currently being followed for ICS network security no longer being effective in protecting industrial networks. # Git Merge. You are in the middle of a merge. Cannot Amend. Let’s say I made changes to branch “abc”, committed and pushed them. This fired a build and a code-review after which the code is ready to be merged. But before these changes are merged, another party merged changes from a branch “xyz” into “abc”. How do I replay my changes on top of changes from “xyz” in “abc” ? Here’s a seemingly obvious command to try: $ git pull origin abc // tldr don't do this. try git pull --rebase
Auto-merging file1
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in file1
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.


At this point, I resolve the commits and attempt a git commit –amend. But this gives an error.

$git commit --amend fatal: You are in the middle of a merge -- cannot amend.$ git rebase
Applying: change name
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
M file1
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
Auto-merging file1
CONFLICT (content):



The problem is the pull step, which implicitly does a fetch+merge and where the merge fails. (check git –help pull).

To recover from this do, squash the unnecessary merge and do a rebase.

$git reset --merge$ git rebase

This shows a list of conflicting files. Find the conflicting files and edit them to resolve conflicts.

nbsp;git rebase --continue
file: needs merge
You must edit all merge conflicts and then
mark them as resolved using git add
$git add file1 file2 nbsp;git rebase --continue Applying: change name nbsp;git commit --amend nbsp;git push origin HEAD:refs/for/abc Here’s the git rebase doc for reference. The rebase command is composed of multiple cherry-pick commands. Cherry-pick is a change-parent operation and changes commit-id = hash(parent-commit-id + changes). Here it re-chains my commit on top of a different commit than the one I started with. The commit –amend would not have changed the commit-id, and so it would not change the parent, so it fails. Git merge is an operation to merge two different branches. It is the opposite of git branch, which creates a branch. In the above example we are applying our local changes to the same branch, which has undergone some changes since our last fetch. Another error sometimes seen during a cherry-pick is the “fatal: You are in the middle of a cherry-pick — cannot amend”. This happens on a “git commit –amend” and here it expects you to do a plain “git commit” to first complete the cherry-pick operation. A git commit references the current set of changes and the parent commit. A git merge references two parent commits. A git merge may involve a new commit if the two parents have diverged and conflicts need to be resolved. Some idempotent (safe) and useful git commands.$ git reflog [--date=iso]  # show history of local commits to index
$git show # or git show commit-hash, git show HEAD^^$ git diff [ --word-diff | --color-diff ]
$git status # shows files staged for commit (added via git add to the index). different from git diff$ git branch [-a]
$git tag -l # list all tags$ git describe # most recent tag reachable from current commit
$git config --list$ git remote -v # git remote is a repo that contains the same proj

nbsp;git fetch --dry-run
$git log --decorate --graph --abbrev-commit --date=relative --author=username$ git log --decorate --pretty="format:%C(yellow)%h%C(green)%d%Creset %s -> %C(green)%an%C(blue), %C(red)%ar%Creset"
$git log -g --abrev-commit --pretty=online 'HEAD@{now}'$ git grep login -- "*yml"
$tig # use d, t, g to change views; use / to search$ git fsck [--unreachable]
$git verify-pack -v .git/objects/pack/pack-*.idx | grep -v chain | sort -k3nr | head # list of largest files$ git cat-file -p <hash> # view object - tree/commit/blob
$git clean -xdn Difference between ‘origin’ and ‘upstream’ terms is explained here. An interactive git cheat sheet is here. There is only one origin, the one you cloned your repo from, there can be many remotes, which are copies of your project. Update sequence: working_directory -> index -> commit -> remote Some terms defined: origin = main remote repository master = default (master/main) branch on the remote repository HEAD = current revision git uses the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function for content-addressing individual files (blobs) and directories (trees) as well as commits – which track changes to the entire tree. Since each tree is a SHA-1 hash over the SHA-1 hashes of the files it contains, the SHA-1 change of a child that is n-levels deep, propagates to the root of the tree. The index used in ‘git add’ is under .git/index . It can be viewed with$ git ls-files --stage --abbrev --full-name --debug
This does not store the file contents, just their paths. The content for a new commit is stored under .git/objects/<xy>/<z>    where xy is the first two digits of the hash and z is the rest of 40 char hash.  If you do a fresh checkout the .git/object is empty except for the .git/objects/pack directory which stores the entire commit history in compressed form in a .pack file and a .idx index file. An mmap is done on these files for fast searching.



# RSA World 2017

I was struck by the large number of vendors offering visibility as a key selling point. Into various types of network traffic. Network monitors, industrial network gateways, SSL inspection, traffic in VM farms, between containers, and on mobile.

More expected are the vendors offering reduced visibility – via encryption, TPMs, Secure Enclaves, mobile remote desktop, one way links, encrypted storage in the cloud etc. The variety of these solutions is also remarkable.

Neil Degrasse’s closing talk was so different yet strangely related to these topics, the universe slowly making itself visible to us through light from distant places, with insights from physicists and mathematics building up to the experiments that recently confirmed gravitational waves – making the invisible, visible. . This tenuous connection between security and physics left me misty eyed. What an amazing time to be living in.