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How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

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Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#41

Post by lovelyviking »

argsnd wrote: post #38
lovelyviking wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about much simpler scenario, no threat at all. Just dumb bug in software that puts your computer in DFU mode that says, please connect it to another Mac. Nice isn't it? And then you should run and find 'another mac'. What if there are no other macs around? What if you travel and have no connection to the internet or it's limited ? This is not a hypothetical situation, this is exactly what have happened in my case…

Just use https://github.com/libimobiledevice/idevicerestore on a Linux or Windows machine. Yes, if you don't have internet access you have a problem, but I'm personally happy enough with the benefits of this security model that I'm willing to accept the tradeoff.

>I'm happy willing to accept the tradeoff.

For now ... Thank you for the link but may I suggest you to think about the future and where it leads.

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#42

Post by smoldesu »

lovelyviking wrote: post #36
GeekyBear wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is about tendency and attempt to make it a norm/legalize to sell personal computers without respecting right of the owner to have a full control over their own computer. If owner cannot fully control own computer this computer cannot be called 'personal' anymore. I have bad news about Intel CPUs. >[Intel] processors are running a closed-source variation of the open-source MINIX 3. We don't know exactly what vers…

therefore I've said this before: The full control of devices you own is absolutely essential. It requires a complete transparency of basic components like cpu micro-code, firmware and hardware otherwise it can and will be abused. [0] .. unless everything is absolutely transparent including microcode and hardware it is not acceptable as freedom respecting solution. [1] then I've got unexpected opposition from the one…

marcan seems to be part of a new breed of hacker, less interested in the "why" we do it and more interested in the "how" of it. Works pretty well for tackling a challenge like blindly picking at a black-box ISA/SIP, but I don't think his project has the kind of ideological understanding that keeps the libre desktop alive. Getting it to work is one thing; building a community to maintain your work is another.

Unfortunately, that's going to constitute a lot of the people you encounter these days. Half-measures are better than no-measures, but I really do miss the days of vigilant software development instead of cleaning up Apple's scraps.

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#43

Post by hraedon »

lovelyviking wrote: post #29
jeff_vader wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the threat you are planing against. If for some reason I'm target of US government - I'm screwed anyway. If my concern is trusting the laptop after I left it in train station and got it back from some random dude - it's good enough.

>It really depends on the threat you are planing against. What about oppressive let's say Russian government while you travel let's say in Ukraine and then occupation occurs. Not a fantastic scenario by the way ... It really doesn't depend on the threat at all. It's about the model of the society you wish to have and what values you promote. It's about who you wish to be responsible : the 'big company' caring about y…

All sentiments like this one and those similar to it elide the facts that 1) we’ve tried relying on “user responsibility” before, and excusing the comically bad outcomes through victim blaming doesn’t change them; and 2) we didn’t get together and vote Apple the only manufacturer of computers.

If you don’t like their model, choose someone else. Why should average users who would otherwise be served perfectly well by Apple’s solution be required to be “responsible” for some subset of personal security you think denotes a “responsible” citizen from an “irresponsible” one?

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#45

Post by judge2020 »

lovelyviking wrote: post #44

"When Apple's servers go down you lose the ability to do low-level recovery on these machines anyway, since DFU flashing requires phoning home to get a ticket for your machine as well as low-level configuration data" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704923

This has been a thing on iOS since I want to say the iOS 7 days, ie. the introduction of shsh2 blobs, and it ultimately hasn't been an issue.

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#46

Post by jahewson »

lovelyviking wrote: post #26
xoa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, I'm in favor of legal mandate that hardware owners have the buy-time option to enable adding their own keys to any root trust stores on their devices. However, that'd be in addition to Apple's keys and wouldn't be about the security of Apple's keys, because Apple is part of the fundamental trust foundation if you buy a Mac or iDevice. Period. The devices are massively vertically integrated, right down…

>If you completely don't trust Apple, then you absolutely should not use their hardware at all. So some level "trust Apple" is simply a security axiom on this platform. It is not about trusting Apple or any other company for that matter. It is about tendency and attempt to make it a norm/legalize to sell personal computers without respecting right of the owner to have a full control over their own computer. If owner…

> Company goes away

We’re talking about Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, sat on over $100bn in cash just “going away”, in what, the lifetime of a laptop? For me that’s 3-5 years, for others maybe 10. That’s an absurd premise. The probability of that is so close to zero it doesn’t bear consideration.

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#47

Post by BoorishBears »

zaxbeast wrote: post #35
BoorishBears wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your comment doesn't make sense? You wrote: > completely insecure if you are not the only one with the key What key is shared between you and the manufacturer here? There's signing keys and there's passcodes, which ones are you "not the only one with"?

> BoorishBears - What key is shared between you and the manufacturer here? There's signing keys and there's passcodes, which ones are you "not the only one with"? because you don't even have the key? not sure where passcodes came from

sigh

> completely insecure if you are not the only one with the key

This implies you are referring to a key that the user has.

What key does the user have?

A passcode? Password?

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#48

Post by duskwuff »

xoa wrote: post #23
zaxbeast wrote: post #6

completely insecure if you are not the only one with the key

For the record, I'm in favor of legal mandate that hardware owners have the buy-time option to enable adding their own keys to any root trust stores on their devices. However, that'd be in addition to Apple's keys and wouldn't be about the security of Apple's keys, because Apple is part of the fundamental trust foundation if you buy a Mac or iDevice. Period. The devices are massively vertically integrated, right down…

> hardware owners have the buy-time option to enable adding their own keys to any root trust stores on their devices

Would you really be more comfortable knowing that your hardware vendor had the capability to produce machines with a low-level, unremoveable backdoor? I'm not sure I would. A feature like that can be used against users more easily than it can be used by those users.

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#49

Post by mlyle »

lovelyviking wrote: post #32
jeff_vader wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the threat you are planing against. If for some reason I'm target of US government - I'm screwed anyway. If my concern is trusting the laptop after I left it in train station and got it back from some random dude - it's good enough.

How about much simpler scenario, no threat at all. Just dumb bug in software that puts your computer in DFU mode that says, please connect it to another Mac. Nice isn't it? And then you should run and find 'another mac'. What if there are no other macs around? What if you travel and have no connection to the internet or it's limited ? This is not a hypothetical situation, this is exactly what have happened in my case…

> Just dumb bug in software that puts your computer in DFU mode that says, please connect it to another Mac. Nice isn't it? And then you should run and find 'another mac'.

If your fundamental firmware-stuff is screwed up on any platform, you are going to have a bad time. Being able to plug into an off-the-shelf machine and fix it, or to plug into another PC running special software, is much better than I'm accustomed to.

Re: How Secure Boot Works on M1 Series Macs

#50

Post by InvertedRhodium »

judge2020 wrote: post #45
lovelyviking wrote: post #44

"When Apple's servers go down you lose the ability to do low-level recovery on these machines anyway, since DFU flashing requires phoning home to get a ticket for your machine as well as low-level configuration data" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704923

This has been a thing on iOS since I want to say the iOS 7 days, ie. the introduction of shsh2 blobs, and it ultimately hasn't been an issue.

Unless, of course, you need to perform a low level recovery when Apples servers are unavailable, for whatever reason. Then, it seems that it would be quite the problem.
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