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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?

#371

Post by kccqzy »

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…

Seriously, but make multiple user accounts on your computer. That's the traditional UNIX way of enforcing isolation, and it goes back to the days of hundreds of people sharing one single UNIX machine.

And don't give any software root access.

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

#372

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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

The pivotal word in this question is "you". If you allow a third party, e.g., Google, Apple, Microsoft, a "Certificate Authority", etc., to decide "trust" on your behalf, then it is the third party that controls "trust", not "you".

A third party can tell "you" that "your personal machine" has or has not been "compromised". The third party can decide who to trust.

However, this is quite different than you deciding who to trust.

Under the trust models promoted by "tech" companies like the ones mentioned above, ultimately "you" are not supposed to be the one deciding trust. They want to do this for you.

Unfortunately, "tech" companies are themselves third parties and they may have commercial interests counter to yours.

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

#373

Post by bjackman »

a-dub wrote: post #331
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 think tanenbaum will be vindicated in the end. monolithic kernels are like 90s computer networks with perimeter security. if i were to guess, i'd guess that the future is microkernels with some sort of hardware accelerated secure message passing facility. zero-trust at kernel design scale.

I think many at Google would agree (https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/get-started/learn/intro/zirc...)

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

#375

Post by drpixie »

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…

I like your shorter list - but I'd suggest concerned people also avoid the obvious attack surfaces:

* Windows

* storing data on other people's computers (cloud apps)

(Yes, they're all safe under the right circumstances. But the right circumstances are far from universal.)

And loosing access to important stuff can be worse than other people seeing the stuff - anything behind a google (etc) account can be lost in a moment, due their mechanised decision making and inability to meaningfully contact humans.

If you can't always easily contact a helpful and authorised human, the continuing existence of your stuff is a gamble. And no, setting off a twitter storm and hoping that the company will be embarrassed into restoring your data is not a suitable contact method!

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

#377

Post by ouraf »

I don't. Every now and then I access gross stuff online to make uncle FBI or cousins Hacker man puke their meals and lose the will to snoop on my boring Facebook account.

And since the video card is old and internet is spotty, brother Bitcoin miner and ransomware delivery man won't have much to win either.

The rest of automated attacks have to go through basic PC os protection (firewall, antivirus, hardware locks for unwanted code execution, etc).

It's the digital equivalent of "in god we trust"

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

#378

Post by ramtatatam »

I can't tell if my hardware was not compromised (most likely it was not), but for the data I store on my SSD - I keep it fully encrypted with boot stored on hardware aes-256-encrypted USB drive. Laptop won't boot without the USB plugged in, and USB won't unlock unless correct key is provided. Not too sophisticated but enough for my humble needs (that is I'm the only one who can boot the laptop, and I know my data will be safely forgotten if my flat gets robbed or if I forget my laptop on the train etc.).

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

#379

Post by andy_ppp »

lrvick wrote: post #159
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…

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 keep thinking about this too, everything should be containerised and you can control access to shared resources like the clipboard or file system with absolute certainty, even stopping certain app from access to anything.

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

#380

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

highwaylights wrote: post #292
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…

> 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…

> 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

The code-signing is relatively trivial to workaround, you just have to get users to run xattr(1) to remove quarantine status.

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