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State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

blog.invisiblethings.org

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Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#41

Post by Fnoord »

mastazi wrote: post #9
Animats wrote: post #5

This was in 2015. Did he ever develop a stateless laptop? It would be useful to have one. Too many governments want to snoop on your devices at border crossings.

I know it's not exactly the same thing but you could check out something like the Purism laptop[1] and you could run Tails from a USB key[2] P.S. I wouldn't assume that someone called Joanna is a 'he' LOL [1] https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-p... [2] https://tails.boum.org/

> P.S. I wouldn't assume that someone called Joanna is a 'he' LOL

There are no girls on the internet.

Joking aside, as for Tails, Whonix has advantages and drawbacks:

"Unlike Tails, Whonix is not "amnesic"; both the Gateway and the Workstation retain their past state across reboots. Not being amnesic improves security on the Gateway, by allowing Tor's "entry guard" system to choose long-lived entry points for the Tor network, reducing adversaries' ability to trap users by running malicious relays.

On the other hand, a non-amnesic Workstation could possibly allow attackers, especially operators of Web services, to inject state and associate a user's sessions with one another, despite the Tor Browser's safeguards; for some users, this could be a serious security exposure. It is possible for users to force the Workstation to be partly or wholly amnesic by manually resetting it to old states after use, although the developer does not suggest this. It is also possible to run more than one Workstation VM with a single Gateway." [1]

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

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#42

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

jack_quack wrote: post #4

I actually would like a stateless computer. A pure functional laptop. It could store state on the cloud as a series of changesets, and each boot would be a "checkout" of the top state. Then as you compute, you make to make new changesets.

See GuixSD: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Featur...

It doesn't store "in the cloud" by default, but there's no reason you couldn't set that up.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#43

Post by wpietri »

I think I must be missing something fundamental. As far as I can tell, the core notion is to move all laptop firmware to an external storage device that has a write-protect switch.

How is this better than an external write-protect switch for the firmware on the device itself? Considering my normal patterns of device usage, I'm just going to put the laptop-specific Trusted Stick into each of my laptops and leave it there. In which case I'm not seeing why it should be removable at all.

And regardless, I'm not seeing how a write-protect switch for firmware, whether on a stick or in the device, is actually better for the average user. At some point the computer is going to tell them, "Hey, you need to allow this security upgrade." How do they know when to allow writes?

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#45

Post by monocasa »

mastazi wrote: post #2

It's frustrating that the author is using the word "stateless" because it usually means something different in the context of computer-related topics. Maybe the title of the paper should have been something like "A proposal for an ephemeral-storage laptop" or something along those lines.

At least in the deeply embedded space, in context 'state' is commonly used to mean 'persistant state'.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#46

Post by wanderfowl »

This is a particularly appropriate link right now, given that the core idea of "saving data and state is something which should be avoided" is seeing a renaissance in both privacy-focused circles and in privacy-focused regulatory policies. I love the idea that saving state is to be avoided, and I hope to see it implemented with increasing granularity, both on other people's computers (e.g. web services) and locally.

Remotely, a trend away from "You must create an account to view this cat meme, now enter your date of birth and present a working email address which we'll send a message to" is particularly appealing. And with hosted services, particularly paid ones, I'd love to see privacy policies focused on how little data is kept, rather than how much. I keep hoping that the regulatory or legal or insurance environment will change such that sooner or later, companies will view stored user data as a liability more than an asset, and 'zero knowledge' will be a desirable thing.

Locally, as per-application permissions and sandboxing grows stronger, I can picture a class of applications which would be hard-restricted from saving data between sessions (e.g. the browser, a calculator, a scratch-pad app). Or perhaps, "the only data you can save must be XML, in this plaintext file, so that preferences are saved, but nothing else. Qubes (OP's baby) does this already, but I think a dash of this in existing OSes would be a small step towards big security.

As an aside, in my estimation, Joanna Rutkowska is one of the most compelling computational thinkers today. Although her work tends to be at the most elaborate-threat-focused edge of computing security, reading it, it often feels like she's already running "where the ball is going", and I wouldn't be shocked to find that in 20 years, some of the 'whoa, crazy' things from Qubes or this stateless approach are actually regularly used in mainstream computing. I have no particular threat, and no particular need, and I suspect that many of the programs I use regularly wouldn't work there, but there's a part of me that would love to spend more time in Qubes.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#47

Post by deepsun »

jstanley wrote: post #28

I've started running Tails on my laptop on a daily basis. It's great. https://tails.boum.org/ It runs off a USB stick and presents a pristine system each time you boot. Modifications to the filesystem go on a ramdisk "overlay", which disappears as soon as you power it off. It does support "encrypted persistent storage", but there is quite fine-grained control over what things are allowed to go in it. In particular, n…

I don't think it's relevant to the article. If your host machine has malware in CPU firmware, then it doesn't matter whether you boot from [stateless] USB, because malware sits between your kernel and, say, keyboard, network card, or display.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#49

Post by acct1771 »

gameswithgo wrote: post #36

I would like a phone/laptop where you can take sexy pictures and be sure they stay on the phone, and be sure they get deleted when you delete them. Think I can get VC money for this idea?

A camera with an SD card is hardly revolutionary stuff.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#50

Post by peter_d_sherman »

Hi. A lot of interesting and intelligent comments, but I think that on the whole, we've over-complicated the issue.

To explain what I mean, consider a Commodore 64, Apple IIe, or Atari 800, Ti99 4a, or Radio Shack Color Computer, or most home computers from the early 1980's.

None of these computers, NONE OF THEM, had any form of persistent memory (Flash, EEPROM, battery-backed CMOS, CPU persistent memory, etc.) such that when you unplugged the computer and plugged it back in, something, even so much as a single bit was changed.

In other words, you unplug, and you start over with the exact same initial STATE as you did the first day when you unpacked the box.

That is, software, legitimate or malware, CANNOT change the initial power-up state of the computer. CANNOT.

That is STATELESS HARDWARE.

Note that I did not include x86 PC's in my list, because they typically have battery backed up CMOS, and onboard FLASH in newer models. Those things (and places for writeable Firmware) STORE STATE, thus they change the INITIAL power-up state of the computer.

Once a computer can store state between power offs, then you could be dealing with a different machine than you were when it first came out of the box.

When that happens, now you need all kinds of crazy security asserts that whatever is in there is safe. As opposed to simply powering off, and starting fresh, knowing that you are.

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