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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?

#291

Post by wintermutestwin »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #275
wintermutestwin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Given the most common network activity is web browsing, it seems like enabling protections in the browser is becoming mandatory for the security-conscious. What I am looking for is an easy way to run something like a LiveCD OS in a VM for browsing. The problem is that I have never found a decent LiveCD that has Firefox with all of the mandatory extensions (uBlock Origin, etc...). I guess I could customize my own Liv…

> I guess I could customize my own LiveCD, but last I looked into it, doing so seemed complex and too time consuming to figure out. Here's a 5m solution whose starting point might be acceptable: - install Nix - Follow first two steps at https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Creating_a_NixOS_live_CD to generate iso

That does look simple! Are the steps:

1. Install Nix in a VM or on a clean HD

2. Customize Firefox to my liking

3. follow the two steps you highlight

4. Load my created iso in a VM

Right?

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

#292

Post by highwaylights »

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…

> MacOS, iOS, and Windows are proprietary so they are dramatically worse off than Linux in security out of the gate. No one should use these that desires to maximize freedom, security and privacy.

Not sure how fair this is, even though I agree with you with regards to Linux being auditable and the others not.

Windows and macOS these days have vendor-provided code signing authorities that can be leveraged (and are by default), which provides at least some protection against malware at the macro level (in that the certificates can be revoked if something nefarious is identified). This doesn't exist at all in Linux, although third party products are in the early stages.

Windows 11 and macOS have hardware-backed root-of-trust. In Windows the root of trust is the TPM, on macOS it's the T2 (Intel) or the chip package (ARM).

Any of these features could be compromised without your knowing, but at least where you have control authorities for these systems you can draw some comfort in knowing that once new malware has been identified spreading on pretty much any machine, it can be stopped quite rapidly on all machines by revocation until the bug can be patched.

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

#293

Post by fsociety »

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…

I find it hard to believe that the Linux codebase being auditable makes Linux more secure by default than MacOS, iOS, and Windows. I doubt it is humanly feasible to fully read and grok the several million LOC running within Linux. I would, however, trust a default MacOS/iOS/Windows system over a default Linux system. The Linux community has a track record of being hostile to the security community - for their own good reasons. Whereas Apple and Microsoft pay teams to secure their OS by default.

If you install something like grsecurity or use SELinux policies, I could buy the argument. I have yet to see these used in production though.

Also seL4 is not mathematically proven to be secure, it is formally verified which means it does what it says it does. Part of that spec may include exploitable code

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

#294

Post by giantg2 »

"How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?"

You don't. They are all likely "compromised" to some extent. The vast majority likely have asymptomatic/latent state-sponsored vulnerabilities, if not on the machine itself, then in the network infrastructure it uses. For the most part, people might not consider them "malicious third parties".

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

#296

Post by Spooky23 »

nickjj wrote: post #222
Spooky23 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is more other members of your household. Your roommate, kids, spouse, etc. Policy and regulatory requirements don’t allow incidental disclosure to people like that, and the company has no relationship with them. I dealt with this as a policy issue recently. Controls like aggressive screen lockouts are one of the few options available to allow some categories of workers to work outside of a company controlle…

> Controls like aggressive screen lockouts are one of the few options available to allow some categories of workers to work outside of a company controlled premises. What does the policy really protect against? If it's being locked out after 15 minutes of inactivity because of roommates or kids it doesn't protect you against anything in the grand scheme of things. For example if I leave my office for lunch and you st…

It reduces risk by minimizing disruption if you’re following other work rules. If we locked it in 30s, people wouldn’t be able to work.

Re: the “treat people like a criminal” take. A common approach organizations are taking is employee surveillance. I don’t want to know that your girlfriend has a conviction or that your kid sits next to you with sensitive data in your screen, etc. And I don’t want to force you into an office.

There’s a difference between “security” and risk management. If the discussion was pure security with low/no risk tolerance, you’d be working on a locked down terminal server in an office.

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

#297

Post by soheil »

ttctciyf wrote: post #56
gnfargbl wrote: post #9

Here's a short, fairly practical guide that you might find helpful: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/Cyber-Essentials-Requirements-... . It is aimed mostly at small businesses, but I find a lot of the guidance to be pretty relevant to my personal IT. My even shorter (and incomplete) summary of the document would be: configure your router and firewall; remove default passwords and crapware from your devices; use a lock s…

> enable anti-malware if your OS has it . . . Would be interested in hearing other things Given the most common network activity is web browsing, it seems like enabling protections in the browser is becoming mandatory for the security-conscious. For me this amounts to enabling NoScript and uBlock[edit: [0]] plugins in Firefox, desktop and mobile versions, and disabling or locking down various "features". An additiona…

With respect the question is about the machine being compromised, I'm not sure how XSS, phishing, etc. attacks are relevant.

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

#298

Post by ignoramous »

mysterydip wrote: post #281
goodpoint wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...assuming you blindly trust google. The same company that sends on average 12 MB of telemetries a day from android devices.

Do you have a link for that? I'd love to send it to some friends.

Not OP; see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

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

#299

Post by soheil »

ulimn wrote: post #58
checkyoursudo wrote: post #33

Bios? I'm not sure I can ever be certain. For the rest, I run a pretty esoteric setup (compiled-from-source custom configured linux kernel with no binary blobs; all software compiled from source, with no exceptions; aggressive, burdonsome-to-me privilege separation; chroots and VMs for various degrees of potential threat; etc). I have no illusions that it is perfectly safe. What I am comfortable with is that, in orde…

I'm genuinely curious: Do you check/audit the code you compile and run on your machine? Going with the assumption of "no": How is it then different than downloading a prebuilt version from an official source?

I think for hardware level code and things link bios the only way is to trust the manufacturer. You could also trust the manufacturer but if they are not large enough to have fully vetted and trusted vendors then you're back to square one. So I think only in this sense it says something about the high degree of security of devices made by Apple.

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

#300

Post by kube-system »

ghostpepper wrote: post #186
kube-system wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linux kernel is much more than a million LoC. Closer to 30 million.

If anything I think this underscores the parent comment - open source is not inherently more secure than closed, it just adds another potential avenue (source code audit) to ensure security. If nobody actually audits the source, and the closed-source binary has had other types of testing done on it, it's likely that the closed source binary will be more secure.

Yes, my comment was in support of its parent. If reading a million lines is hard, reading ~30 million is harder.
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