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Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#241

Post by grogenaut »

LinuxBender wrote: post #209
javajosh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ECHELON AI is yawning Well, presumably it would stop yawning if you were, like, part of an armed rebellion. The perspective I'd like to hear would be the Ukranian civil and military resistance to Russia's invasion. How do they know their systems aren't compromised? Because, yeah, in their case, being compromised means getting killed.

in their case, being compromised means getting killed. In fact there have recently been articles about this and each side ordering their troops to stop using their cell phones. Both sides have attributed several mass casualties to cell phones. This is probably harder to enforce with conscripts and military contractors. Many of the first wave of troops thought they were just going on a training exercise.

Some of these at least were people posting to the socials which doesn't take any form of spying. I haven't seen an analysis of it tho.

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#242

Post by fragmede »

phyphy wrote: post #234
lrem wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you’re tricked into installing a nasty app, you’re likely also tricked into giving it whatever permissions it needs for the nastiness.

Which is not the fault of the OS

who's fault is it then, if not the OS? that's basically the os's job; to isolate and manage the system's resources and access to them therin

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#243

Post by snvzz »

lrvick wrote: post #230
flanked-evergl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux kernel is simply not equipped to run trusted code and untrusted code in the same memory. Just for interest sake, is Linux better or worse than MacOS, iOS and Windows at this?

Linux is a security shit show but it is at least publicly auditable, which is a prerequisite to form reasonably confidence in the security of software, or to rapidly correct mistakes found. OpenBSD by contrast has dual auditing and a stellar security reputation, but development is much slower and compatibility is very low. seL4 as an extreme is a micro-kernel with mathematically provable security by design, but no wo…

>seL4 as an extreme is a micro-kernel with mathematically provable security by design, but no workstation software runs on it yet.

With Genode, POSIX compatibility is at the point where you can run a webkit2-derived browser natively. There is also 3d acceleration.

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#244

Post by paulryanrogers »

ttctciyf wrote: post #82
paulryanrogers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox multi-account containers can be a more convenient way to isolate things, especially now that the container can be limited to only the allowed sites. I also made an app and extensions to help me use multiple browsers, one per site. (Browsr Router)

Regards the containers, I started my profile compartmentalization practice before they arrived, so I never explored them. But I'm curious as to whether each container comes with a complete set of browser permissions, like profiles do, which would enable you (for example) to have a location-enabled container specifically for google maps (in reference to[0]) while disabling it on the container used for search, as you c…

Add-ons cross over container boundaries, so I suspect other browser permissions do too.

You're solution is more bullet proof. For similar reasons I am hoping to add better profile support to Browser Routr.

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#245

Post by NikolaNovak »

conception wrote: post #184
NikolaNovak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, perhaps ignorantly, That may prevent some human being or intelligent agent specifically targeting your nas. I don't think it would help against situations where your primary system is being encrypted for a while, and thus your backups eventually get overwritten with bad stuff.

Replication isn’t backup though?

I would agree, but I feel the GP specifically talked about "Backup NAS", which is where my question pertains.

I do have a set of hard drives I exchange with my friend as "off site" backup. Neither my cloud service nor NAS keep copies/snapshots of previous versions of files; and I have too much stuff to create BlueRay let alone DVD one-off backups :0/

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#246

Post by jart »

rmkrmk wrote: post #163

Are there any somewhat easy-to-use solutions to isolate a development environment? Preventing or at least decreasing the damage malicious packages could do? Like deleting files or uploading a private ssh key/keychain to a 3rd party server? I was looking into things like GitHub Codespaces, I believe they're isolated per repository and integrated into VS Code, but I'd like something I could run on my machine or a serve…

Faraday cage? It's a turnkey solution.

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#247

Post by LinuxBender »

grogenaut wrote: post #241
LinuxBender wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in their case, being compromised means getting killed. In fact there have recently been articles about this and each side ordering their troops to stop using their cell phones. Both sides have attributed several mass casualties to cell phones. This is probably harder to enforce with conscripts and military contractors. Many of the first wave of troops thought they were just going on a training exercise.

Some of these at least were people posting to the socials which doesn't take any form of spying. I haven't seen an analysis of it tho.

haven't seen an analysis of it tho

Same here. GPS tagging in social media is certainly a thing. There are programs and groups of people that can identify locations from a single obscure photo. Then there is GPS data in some photo apps that add exif data. So many options one must assume phones are just loose lips [1] even without factoring in App, OS, Firmware and Baseband Modem backdoors not to mention instant location from satellites.

In my opinion soldiers should be given instructions how to back up their phone contents then hand all tech devices to a range safety officer to put into a belt fed target practice system to give them some closure from their dopamine devices.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_lips_sink_ships

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#248

Post by __turbobrew__ »

Terretta wrote: post #118
nickjj wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bugs me is when this is applied to remote workers in a way that seems optimized for in-office environments. For example IT enforces that your screen becomes locked after 15 minutes of inactivity and also ties in your local computer 's user login password to your SSO login to access everything. It's a contradiction around password best practices. If you force people to input their password multiple times a day th…

TouchID or windows machines with Windows Hello touch solves morale issue. Then they don't type most of the time and the length of 'memorable passwords' (like correct-horse4BATTERY!staple ) isn't a problem.

Yea, my work uses touchid for day to day logins and it works really well

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#249

Post by pbhjpbhj »

panarky wrote: post #206
pixxel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve no doubt you are referring to uBlock Origin but it’s real important to label it as such so the unaware don’t install uBlock.

>> enabling protections in the browser is becoming mandatory > or me this amounts to enabling NoScript and uBlock Hard to see how installing third-party extensions that can view and change data for every site makes the browser more protected.

Just little a third party security guard can't make a building more secure. /s

It's about who/what you trust.

Re: Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

#250

Post by ignoramous »

mindslight wrote: post #203
ignoramous wrote: post #111

ex-AOSP dev here Android and ChromiumOS are likely the most trustable computing platforms out there; doubly so for Android running on Pixels. If you don't prefer the ROM Google ships with, you can flash GrapheneOS or CalyxOS and relock the bootloader. Pixels have several protections in place: - Hardware root of trust: This is the anchor on which the entire TCB (trusted computing base) is built. - Cryptographic verifi…

Most of your bullet points are reinventions of standard technology or incidental complexity. Cryptographic verification of the boot chain with Hardware root of trust are real. Heavily sandboxed userspace is real. Everything else would seem to be a reimplementation of common best practices (disk encryption), or a mitigation of a self-created problem (there shouldn't be binary driver blobs running on the main CPU to be…

> Everything else would seem to be a reimplementation of common best practices...

True, but those protections are enabled by default (on Pixels at least). Users don't have to do anything here.

> And from what I remember, a plain AOSP install seemed to still phone home to Google to check for Internet connectivity and whatnot.

You're not wrong, but GrapheneOS and CalyxOS are valid options, if you don't trust the ROM Pixel ships with. Even with a custom ROM you're left trusting the OEM. It'd be nice if we could have an open hardware / open firmware Android, but it hasn't happened, yet.

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