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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?

#461

Post by TheHappyOddish »

omniglottal wrote: post #442
drozycki wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t this all been long true for iOS as well? There are reasons to hate it, but a walled garden is safer in many ways (as long as you trust Apple). You mention baseband - Android hardware comes with max 3 years of baseband support, compared to 7-9 years on iPhone. The story is similar when it comes to stock OS support. So from my pov, iPhones can be a comparable value (security and otherwise) to the best Android ha…

Accuracy. You're missing "making accurate statements" here. And context - neither Apple's proprietary practices nor "trust" of them are applicable solutions to the problem domain here. A 7-9 year old iOS device is crippled today, with non-user-replaceable parts (both software and hardware). A 3-year-old Pixel is newer than the one I use, running sshd and accepting connections only from the bearer of my private key. T…

It seems you're the one lacking accuracy here.

> A 7-9 year old iOS device is crippled today, with non-user-replaceable parts (both software and hardware).

A 7-9 year old iPhone has user replacable parts (hardware), as does the equivelant Pixel. It also runs perfectly well.

> A 3-year-old Pixel is newer than the one I use, running sshd and accepting connections only from the bearer of my private key.

That's a lovely thought. The baseband manufacturers with their own blobs disagree though.

> The market for old iPhones drops sharply, and is just for folks with an iCloud account. The market for old Pixels allows a Pixel 6 to be sold for >$1000 less than half a year ago (with a more trustworthy third party OS installed), ready for the user to choose whether this trust model of a pre-installed OS is even sufficient.

This is simply untrue. The Pixel 6 is available for $900 AUD new and about $500-600 used. The iPhone 13 (same year) starts at $1200 AUD new and about $800-900 used. The value held is extremely similar, and in fact drops less for older Apple phones than Android ones likely - as the GP mentioned - due to more than double the years of OS support from the vendor.

It's fine for you to decide that the fruit company is less trustworthy than the advertising company, but don't spread nonsense to try and sell your point.

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

#462

Post by bestbuyer__ »

7e wrote: post #274
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…

And yet law enforcement seems to be able to open up Android phones without issue, but has problems with iPhones. Is this still the case?

Not really, companies like Cellebrite provide tools to access iPhones just the same.

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

#463

Post by mike_hearn »

helloooooooo wrote: post #459
mike_hearn wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSIX doesn't implement sandboxing. Apps can opt in to being sandboxed via that tech, but you can also write totally unsandboxed apps. There's also a very light weight app container mode called (internally) Helium which just redirects some filesystem and registry stuff, but the goal is to make uninstalls clean, not security. The Windows kernel does offer an impressive number of options to lock down processes. Look at…

App silos are pretty neat, I also find it kind of shameful that server silos are locked down to server SKUs. I would figure there could be some significant benefit to using them in browser renderer processes.

Chrome does use app containers for its kernel sandbox.

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

#464

Post by mtsr »

mindslight wrote: post #353
mtsr wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking of my kids' future has also made me much more energy-conscious. Meaning I've stopped running my VM host 24/7 like I was, because neither ESX nor Proxmox is really set up for saving energy easily (automated suspending and waking, etc). Which is a shame, since I'm actually finding that with gigabit fiber at home, even on mobile connections I can work pretty decently on homelab VMs. Running something like it on…

I feel like this is the all too common pattern of individuals taking environmental responsibility to absurd levels, while corporations dgaf. How much electricity is burned in datacenters, especially doing zero-sum surveillance tasks? My Ryzen 5700G ("router") idles around 20-25W, which seems like a small price to pay to not be at the mercy of the cloud. That's around 60 miles of driving per month (gas or electric), w…

I totally agree, but I do what I can. And while setup takes me some extra effort, I can now run my 24/7 workloads on a small box and run the big box only when needed.

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

#465

Post by account42 »

mnw21cam wrote: post #416
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not hard. On my backup server, I have an account with a restricted shell that my backed-up machine has an ssh key for. That restricted shell is simply the following script: #!/bin/bash cd ~/backups tar --restrict --keep-old-files -x So the only thing that the backed-up machine (or an attacker) can do with the ssh key is push new files onto the backup server as a tar stream - it can't overwrite any files, and i…

For my server I went one step further and set it up so that the server being backed up has no access to the backup system at all and insteady only prepares encrypted (differential) tar archives that the backup system then grabs.

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

#466

Post by account42 »

krn wrote: post #189
gkbrk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many would consider a ChromeOS device compromised from day one.

From the privacy perspective, ChromeOS is no different than Windows and MacOS. From the security perspective, it's much better, because every single app is running in a sandbox. I don't even use Chrome for web browsing on ChromeOS, since Firefox works just fine with flatpak[1]. [1] https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

> From the privacy perspective, ChromeOS is no different than Windows and MacOS.

And being stabbed is not that different from being shot. I'd rather not be subject to either.

At least with operating systems we do still have better choices for privacy than the three you mentioned.

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

#467

Post by account42 »

andix wrote: post #289
landemva wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA banks seem to have found the 2fa powerpoint presentation and are forcing accounts to use SMS 2fa, with no ability to use something like authenticator app. Nothing about SMS is secure, so their IT is taking a step backward.

SMS is still better than no 2FA, but yes, it’s not secure at all. What really bugs me, that some systems rely only on the 2nd factor, which replaces the password completely. Some even did that with SMS. So you put in you user name and then the SMS code. That’s really bad. Also a lot of Services disguise this method in the „I forgot my password“ function, where you can reset the password just with a sms code.

> SMS is still better than no 2FA

Not if it can be social engineered into a 1FA password reset. Better not to give companies your phone number at all.

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

#468

Post by account42 »

bitexploder wrote: post #107

Run Linux. Install only trusted software. Don’t do sketchy (from a security perspective) things like look at porn or use torrent sites on your main computer. Backup often. Reinstall OS annually. Don’t run Windows. Don’t worry too much. Be happy.

Don't assume that the regular web is safer than porn or torrent sites.

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

#469

Post by andix »

account42 wrote: post #467
andix wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMS is still better than no 2FA, but yes, it’s not secure at all. What really bugs me, that some systems rely only on the 2nd factor, which replaces the password completely. Some even did that with SMS. So you put in you user name and then the SMS code. That’s really bad. Also a lot of Services disguise this method in the „I forgot my password“ function, where you can reset the password just with a sms code.

> SMS is still better than no 2FA Not if it can be social engineered into a 1FA password reset. Better not to give companies your phone number at all.

Yes, that’s true. It should really only be used as second factor and not as a single factor for password resets. I’ve seen this too, and it’s awful. If sms is used for password resets, there should be at least an email notification and a waiting period of a few days.
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