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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?

#321

Post by mindslight »

sowbug wrote: post #316
mindslight wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but full disk encryption was also enabled on my Mom's Ubuntu laptop 15 years ago, because I chose the correct options when I set it up. What commercial vendors offer out of the box has never been a good yardstick for talking about security features, and it's only gotten worse with the rise of the surveillance economy. My fundamental problem with Graphene/Calyx is that I don't trust the devs have enough bandwidt…

Concretely, what discourages me from going Pixel is the Qualcomm integrated baseband/application chipsets. Google Pixel hasn't used Qualcomm chipsets since the Pixel 5.

Thank you! Not following so closely, I had been thinking that "Tensor" was just a coprocessor based on the name.

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

#322

Post by b112 »

lumb63 wrote: post #313
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…

I can’t discuss my former role in too much detail, but it has convinced me that all the above is insufficient in a number of very realistic threat models. One issue is that software has vulnerabilities and bugs. I’m not talking about the software that users run in sandboxes environments. I’m talking about the sandboxes environments. I’m talking about cryptography implementations. I’m talking about the firmware runnin…

Why do companies tell users to “trust them” without any proof they are trustworthy?

You know the answer here, they are not to be trusted.

Samsung phones, for example, have a gpsd, which phones home at random times. This runs as root, ignores vpn settings (so no netguard for you!), and if it is just getting updated agps info, it sure seems to send a lot of data for that.

So no, they don't want a legitly auditable device. Too many questions, you see.

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

#323

Post by akiselev »

lumb63 wrote: post #313
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…

I can’t discuss my former role in too much detail, but it has convinced me that all the above is insufficient in a number of very realistic threat models. One issue is that software has vulnerabilities and bugs. I’m not talking about the software that users run in sandboxes environments. I’m talking about the sandboxes environments. I’m talking about cryptography implementations. I’m talking about the firmware runnin…

> The other major issue is as you alluded to: the need to trust vendors and hardware. Without protection and monitoring at the physical level, the user has no way to verify the operation of the giant stack of technology designed to “protect them”. Without the ability to verify operations, how is the user to trust anything? Why do companies tell users to “trust them” without any proof they are trustworthy?

At the end of the day you need to trust Qualcomm or MediaTek. The Oracle of the hardware world, with more lawyers than engineers, or... MediaTek.

That's a NOPE for me.

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

#324

Post by BLKNSLVR »

amelius wrote: post #108
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% with you on the entirety of your last paragraph. I generally use a device as an access mechanism; a configured window into the data. This configuration is the only thing lost when a device is lost. No data, no function, no service. Configure the replacement device and continue as you were. Virtualisation and Docker-isation makes backups and restores almost enjoyable.

How do you deal with leaking of data?

Not sure I fully understand the context of the question, but for a device to gain access it needs to be allowed into the local network by being in wifi range or authorised on the VPN, plus have username/password access to the service/data.

If, however, there's a backdoor I don't know about, then I'm pwned.

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

#325

Post by drozycki »

akiselev wrote: post #323
lumb63 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t discuss my former role in too much detail, but it has convinced me that all the above is insufficient in a number of very realistic threat models. One issue is that software has vulnerabilities and bugs. I’m not talking about the software that users run in sandboxes environments. I’m talking about the sandboxes environments. I’m talking about cryptography implementations. I’m talking about the firmware runnin…

> The other major issue is as you alluded to: the need to trust vendors and hardware. Without protection and monitoring at the physical level, the user has no way to verify the operation of the giant stack of technology designed to “protect them”. Without the ability to verify operations, how is the user to trust anything? Why do companies tell users to “trust them” without any proof they are trustworthy? At the end…

AFAIK there are no phones on the market with open-source baseband firmware, so you have to trust one of Qualcomm, Broadcom et al with access to all cellular communication. Do you have a best of breed supplier you’ve vetted?

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

#326

Post by BLKNSLVR »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #67
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a backup NAS that's normally powered off, but it's scheduled to turn on, perform backup, shut down. It doesn't wake on LAN and there should be no way of knowing it exists outside of checking DHCP static addresses reservations - and now that I mention it, maybe I should remove it from there too. This minimises the size of the window, and network-snoopable information, required to compromise this set of backups.

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.

The data being backed up is in tiers of importance or 'frequency of change', and based on this the backups are staggered, some daily, some weekly.

I wouldn't often go a full week without checking some file or other, so I think I'd know pretty swiftly if I got infected with an encrypting ransomware virus - hopefully quickly enough to minimise damage.

I also do off-site backups on occasion, so I could roll back to the last full set of off-site backups - so long as I remember where/when the most recent one is.

My main adversary I'm protecting against is hardware failure, however. I think I run a pretty tight ship in restricting access to data that I'd rather not lose.

Maybe some hubris payback will come visit one day though...

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

#328

Post by sweetjuly »

saagarjha wrote: post #50
sweetjuly wrote: post #46

I run the latest betas of macOS and iOS which means I get exploit breaking changes as soon as possible. I keep all the security mitigations on my mac enabled (SIP, secure boot, etc.) which helps makes a variety of exploit flows and persistent compromise difficult. But random malicious code in user space? Well, I really just hope for the best :)

Note that betas sometimes fall behind public releases when it comes to security patches.

Ugh, I suppose you're right. They do seem to skip the beta pipeline for ITWs. I wonder if this has changed now that they're leaning on "rapid security response" patches for critical vulnerabilities, which betas do get, and so hopefully there's parity now. I should dig into this, pretty sure there were a few RSRs recently and it'd be neat to verify that a) betas got the same bugs patched and b) the RSR went out to beta and release at the same time.

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

#329

Post by rejectfinite »

hutzlibu wrote: post #32
jl6 wrote: post #11

I don’t have ultimate trust in any software or hardware, but I get to “good enough” by deciding which providers I trust: * Software: Canonical, Google, Microsoft, Valve, Oracle, Dropbox. I install software from their official repos and keep it up to date. Anything 3rd-party/unofficial/experimental/GitHub goes in a VM. * Hardware: I built my main PC from mainstream commodity components. I have no way of knowing if the…

"which providers I trust: * Software: Google, Microsoft" I trust that Google and Microsoft won't hack into my bank account and steal money, even though they could, but otherwise I assume they collect anything they want and can.

Yes, but the topic is security, not privacy.

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

#330

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

mindslight wrote: post #223
lrvick wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO we have to step back and be honest that the Linux kernel is simply not equipped to run trusted code and untrusted code in the same memory. New bugs are found every few weeks. If history is of any guide Android and ChromiumOS likely still have many critical bugs the public does not know about yet. Sadly the only choice is to burn extra ram to give every security context a dedicated kernel and virtual machine. Hype…

I've never used Qubes. Rather I heavily segment with manually configured VMs. The ones that run proprietary software (eg webbrowsing, MSWin, etc) generally run on a different machine than my main desktop. It's quite convenient as I can go from my office to the couch, and I just open up the same VMs there and continue doing what I was doing. I define the network access for each VM in a spreasheet (local services and I…

Yeah, you should really look into Qubes.
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