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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?

#361

Post by krn »

fsociety wrote: post #293
lrvick wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

> 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.

I think we can have the best of both worlds here: OS distributions that are being maintained by paid teams of security experts, and that can be audited by anybody.

What are the major ones? Android, Chromium OS, RedHat (Fedora, CentOS), and SUSE.

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

#362

Post by bigiain »

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…

While respecting your “I can go into details” comment, I’m curious to hear whatever you _can_ comment on about what sort of adversary has the capabilities you describe and do you have an opinion on whether they use those in tightly targeted attacks only, or do they compromise the entire hardware/software supply chain in a way that they can do “full take surveillance” using it?

If I’m not a terrorist/sex-trafficker/investigative-journalist, can I reasonably ignore those threats even if I, say, occasionally buy personal use quantities of illegal drugs or down/upload copyright material? (With, I guess, the caveat that I’d need to assume the dealer/torrent site at the other end of those connections isn’t under active surveillance…)

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

#363

Post by bigiain »

drozycki wrote: post #325
akiselev wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

And even if you _could_ trust the baseband on your device, there’s the problem that the cell tower is running software you have no visibility of.

If I were the NSA, that’s where I’d be focussing at least some of the attention of the “exploit people’s phones” department. If you want cellular connectivity, the cellular provider needs a real time way to identify your device and it’s location (at least down to neatest few cell towers accuracy).

(And once I had some capability there, the people running the “most secure basebands/devices would be the ones I kept the closest eye on. I’ve heard my local intelligence service are very interested in phone switch on/off events, because they are a signal that someone might be attempting to evade surveillance, and the rarity of “normal people” switching their phone off (or disconnecting from the cellular network) makes it worthwhile collecting all that “metadata” so they can search it for the “interesting” cases.

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

#364

Post by amarshall »

kube-system wrote: post #138
luma wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like a cargo cult approach to the problem. "I'm safe because I compile from source" is an absurd statement when a million LoC is involved.

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

Much of that is drivers that may be disabled if not needed for current hardware, narrowing the audit scope.

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

#365

Post by thot_experiment »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #360
thot_experiment wrote: post #339

I worry so much more about the dumb hardware locks and secure enclaves, OS features etc. I find the risk of a compromised machine to be so much less of an impact on my life than my computer telling me I am not allowed to do something. This is my computer, let me tell it what to do. I hate how much of my time is wasted by all this security stuff. Infinitely more so than had been wasted by actual malware over the last…

Root detection is about reducing risk to companies, presumably sideloading results in substantially increased risk. It’s not about you, it’s about their bottom line, but it can also help prevent grandma from losing their life savings. I’m a security engineer and know what I’m doing and agree there’s some level of security theatre, but it you’re not worried about losing Crown Jewels from a compromise you’re most proba…

Of course I'm worried, I just attempt to understand my threat model, my vulnerability surface and act accordingly. I understand why security exists. I just want to be able to turn it off without having to resort to hours of research of security tech in order to control the devices I own. Obviously I wouldn't give access to an account with my life savings to my rooted phone.

It is about their bottom line, but largely not to protect me or grandma, it's about justifying control and divorcing people from the power of the supercomputer in their pocket. There's more money in making it hard for me to edit my hosts file etc. than there is in preventing the potential loss of my money/data through these restrictions.

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

#367

Post by qu4z-2 »

fragmede wrote: post #242
phyphy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At the direction of the device owner, though.

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

#368

Post by Synaesthesia »

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…

PRISM revelations showed that the state worked together with large companies like Google and Apple, MS, Facebook etc to gather information. The CIA also had backdoors into popular mobile and desktop OSes. I'm afraid we can't trust any device right now.

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

#369

Post by friendlyHornet »

cozzyd wrote: post #204
friendlyHornet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was an intern at a company, I forgot to lock my screen once when I went to the toilet My colleagues edited my .bashrc to echo "lock your screen next time"

I like to alias emacs to vim or rm, depending on how charitable I'm feeling. (Kidding obviously, at least for the latter).

I would alias both vim and emacs to cat

I think at first the colleague might assume it's a bug in the terminal not someone had replaced the command with an alias

or just alias them to echo, so that it prints out the file name, not even the file content

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