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

Post by raxxorraxor » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:55 AM UTC

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…

Post by roydivision » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 8:06 AM UTC

doc_gunthrop wrote: post #306

bo1024 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're thinking of privacy, not security? In terms of privacy, Android is "compromised" by default, i.e. Google collects and stores a ton of private information about you. I believe Apple used to be much better, and still is, but getting worse.

> In terms of privacy, Android is "compromised" by default, i.e. Google collects and stores a ton of private information about you. Apple also does the same. Also, this only applies if you're running an Android device "out-of-the-box". Fortunately, there exist AOSP forks that mitigate this type of intrusion (e.g. GrapheneOS).

Post by mnw21cam » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #199

jl6 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your main computer has had all its files encrypted by ransomware, will the backup NAS know not to replace the good backup with a bad one? i.e. hopefully it's not doing something like `rsync --delete`.

Not the GP but I use ZFS snapshots for such things. Should the files be overwritten or deleted I can always fetch an older copy from snapshots. The trick is to make sure nothing has access to the backup storage, which is obviously easier said than done.

  #!/bin/bash
  cd ~/backups
  tar --restrict --keep-old-files -x

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #402

a-dub wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obligatory mention of capability based security goes here. We really need a way to run untrusted code and give it just the files we want, at run-time .

Post by mihaigalos » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 11:26 AM UTC

mihaigalos wrote: post #410

I've taken steps to secure my Linux: * Using Yubikey PAM always as a 2FA for ssh,sudo (also on every Linux in my home network). * Always require authentication on each sudo command (prevents escalating once and then reusing privileges). * Only running Docker with sudo as recommended (requires 2FA now). * Closing all traffic other than services I need with nftables. Regularly look at the journalctl for suspicious acti…