Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you recommend any modern systems that behave like that?
https://genode.org
this is a step forward but they need to lean into hw isolation more. definitely a very interesting project. inspiring :)
NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. If you've got a microkernel / capabilities based OS, the amount of mischief that someone can cause is severely reduced. It's my belief that we can have general purpose, easy to use, secure computing for everyone. No UAC crap, or horrible systems like AppArmor, no virus scanners, etc... just computers that do what you want, and only what you want. We could have had it decades ago, if things had happened i…
seL4[0] being the formally-proven modern representative. 0. https://sel4.systems/
sel4 is neat. and open source. there are many like it proprietary.
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#113This quote from TFA is highly likely to be a conflation, exaggeration or extrapolation of what actually happened: > "On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”" Why: 1. It's a p…
The journalist later admitted that he failed to provide the appropriate context and nuance, which comes down to "red team pen-testers who already had high-side network access were able to more quickly and effectively compromise systems when they were using Mythos as part of their workflow," which is a pretty crucial distinction to make between that and the spectre of Skynet that the article raises.
JFC thats is not even remotely close.
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The journalist later admitted that he failed to provide the appropriate context and nuance, which comes down to "red team pen-testers who already had high-side network access were able to more quickly and effectively compromise systems when they were using Mythos as part of their workflow," which is a pretty crucial distinction to make between that and the spectre of Skynet that the article raises.
JFC thats is not even remotely close.
Here is the update from The Economist...
>An update. A US official tells me that Sen. Warner misunderstood the NSA director Gen. Rudd in this case. Rudd did use the 'hours, not weeks' wording, but the use of Mythos in this context was—as widely assumed—part of a red-teaming effort, i.e. testing the security of internal networks
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what does that mean? Can I browse a webpage, open a doc, if those are listed as specific usage? And if not, what's the purpose of this and why are people talking about it with such import?
most people dont do a lot on their machines. they have specific tasks they want to do. The idea is to isolate by default and crack open gaps by policy. You can still do 'anything' but you wouldnt want to enable 'anything' to be possible in the policy..
Sounds like security through compartmentalization is more user-friendly: You can run whatever you want and how you want it in a dedicated VM, keeping sensitive things safely isolated, without much thinking of what to enable. Case in point: Qubes OS, my daily driver. Btw it already exists and is stable.
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
most people dont do a lot on their machines. they have specific tasks they want to do. The idea is to isolate by default and crack open gaps by policy. You can still do 'anything' but you wouldnt want to enable 'anything' to be possible in the policy..
Sounds like security through compartmentalization is more user-friendly: You can run whatever you want and how you want it in a dedicated VM, keeping sensitive things safely isolated, without much thinking of what to enable. Case in point: Qubes OS, my daily driver. Btw it already exists and is stable.
> security through compartmentalization is more user-friendly: You can run whatever you want and how you want it in a dedicated VM, keeping sensitive things safely isolated
My brain hurts. How is a system where you can run whatever you want, however you want, but still keep sensitive things safely isolated possible?
Either you have restrictions on what you can run or access (in which case those limit sandboxed capabilities) or you have a hypothetically secure system, the security features of which you never leverage (because sandboxes have absolute freedom).
Unless you were talking about the ability to guarantee a monitor-only hypervisor or resource slice a machine into multiple tenants? (i.e. no/light touch hypervisor situations)
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like security through compartmentalization is more user-friendly: You can run whatever you want and how you want it in a dedicated VM, keeping sensitive things safely isolated, without much thinking of what to enable. Case in point: Qubes OS, my daily driver. Btw it already exists and is stable.
> security through compartmentalization is more user-friendly: You can run whatever you want and how you want it in a dedicated VM, keeping sensitive things safely isolated My brain hurts. How is a system where you can run whatever you want, however you want, but still keep sensitive things safely isolated possible? Either you have restrictions on what you can run or access (in which case those limit sandboxed capabi…
I'm not sure I understand your question. VMs run full operating systems on top of Xen hypervisor relying on hardware-assisted virtualization (VT-d or similar). You can run untrusted software in a dedicated VM and keep your sensitive data in another offline VM.
The dom0 has no network and doesn't manage, e.g., USB devices.
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#118Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#119This is really making me raise an eyebrow. I’m sure mythos is an improvement for sure. I don’t think the framing of it hacked the entire NSA is fully truthful. I’d like a more in depth understanding of what actually happened. Excited to be proved wrong tho!
From the outset, Mythos’s PR has been rather dodgy.
Marketing has been brilliant thou.
Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> security through compartmentalization is more user-friendly: You can run whatever you want and how you want it in a dedicated VM, keeping sensitive things safely isolated My brain hurts. How is a system where you can run whatever you want, however you want, but still keep sensitive things safely isolated possible? Either you have restrictions on what you can run or access (in which case those limit sandboxed capabi…
I'm not sure I understand your question. VMs run full operating systems on top of Xen hypervisor relying on hardware-assisted virtualization (VT-d or similar). You can run untrusted software in a dedicated VM and keep your sensitive data in another offline VM. The dom0 has no network and doesn't manage, e.g., USB devices.
You can't have full general purpose computing on a system and perfect isolation for free.
By definition, the latter implies limits on the former.
Either you have complete freedom to run whatever you want, however you want, or you enforce limits to guarantee system behavior and enforce isolation.
And if you do the latter... then you don't have the former.