Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 276 posts

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#211

Post by jtriangle »

kmeisthax wrote: post #191
userbinator wrote: post #186

Obviously people might screw up, but the spec included a way to revoke any signed components that turned out not to be trustworthy "trustworthy" according to who ? Remember that dystopia does not appear spontaneously, but steadily advances little-by-little. What's the summary? Microsoft (understandably) didn't want it to be possible to attack Windows by using a vulnerable version of grub that could be tricked into ex…

The alternative dystopia is one where the NSA can grab your laptop, rip out the storage, write some code into the boot chain, put the storage back, leave, and you have no evidence to know who did that. Signed code fixes this by requiring someone actually put their name to the code. If it's not someone I recognize, I don't boot. And yes, the NSA could theoretically compromise a signing key with a $5 wrench. But then t…

There's no state actor that any of that would protect against. You, and everyone else, is already compromised at a level so deep there is no hope of digging out if that is your adversary.

What these technologies protect is market share, nothing more.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#212

Post by fmajid »

antonkochubey wrote: post #107
syene wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with bootloaders is they really can’t spare a lot of storage. Storing different QR codes for all the common errors might be asking too much.

Currently EFI partitions are on the order of 300-500 MB for common installs, that'd allow you to store millions of PNG-compressed QR codes. Or even better, a small library which'd allow bootloader to generate it on the fly.

On my system the full qrencode binary is 85K, and it supports a lot more output formats than needed in this application.

http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/index.html.en

That said, with iPhone cameras supporting live OCR and URL detection, a QR code would be unnecessary.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#213

Post by jtriangle »

Grimburger wrote: post #209
bigiain wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your adversary is a nation state, you've already lost. Which gives me another opportunity to quote from my favourite Usenix paper: "In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.…

> If your adversary is a nation state, you've already lost. Is that why it took 10 years to find Bin Laden, the most wanted man on Earth? Get the feeling intel agencies aren't as omnipotent or competent as they want people to believe.

Most of that time he was in a series of caves located in a fairly apathetic nuclear power's boarders.

He was also trained and equipped by the CIA.

So, if you're willing to live in caves where they can't easily search for you after being trained and equipped by the best of the best, sure, you might live slightly longer.

Doesn't seem like a tenable circumstance to me though.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#214

Post by jeroenhd »

franga2000 wrote: post #207

I don't understand what the expected behaviour is here? Let's say you dual-boot two copies of Arch so we don't drag M$ into this. You update one, get the latest bootloader update that increments this security generation thingy. You reboot to go update the other one as well but its number is too low, so it's unbootable. What now?

That's why you wait a while before raising the SBAT requirements, so both of your distros can be updated. Microsoft waited two years, for instance.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#215

Post by literalAardvark »

palisade wrote: post #193
thwarted wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think understandably, everyone is concerned because it felt like an affront by MS against Linux. But, I don't think that was their thought process at all. Given Microsoft's history, it's hard to really be sure. It's been a quarter century since The Halloween Documents and Microsoft definitely gives the air of contributing to the open source ecosystem today, but giants like having a big moat to defend, and old hab…

There was nothing to be gained in this except ill will. Hanlon's Razor suggests they were in a hurry to fix a security issue and didn't dot their i's on checking for dual boot systems.

It's a trolley problem, and it's not in Microsoft's locus of control to keep dual boot systems dual booting. So they don't try.

They have never, ever supported anything other than the Microsoft bootloader[s], and if you work around that for instance it's pretty trivial to blow up your data by hibernating Windows and booting into a different partition. Resuming hibernation loads the old MFT onto the modified partition and you pretty much lose everything.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#216

Post by mordae »

wongarsu wrote: post #86
Hydrocarb0n wrote: post #41

IMO secure boot is a waste of time for most scenarios, if theres closed source EUFI code running god knows what in the background, it dosn't matter how signed and secure your OS kernel is. Ive never been sucessfully able to dual boot windows and linux on a mobo with secure boot turned on, it seems that is a feature not a bug I'm sure MS would never influence hardware vendors to make it dissadvantage a growing number…

TLAs from major powers probably have backdoors in your UEFI, mainboard or OS. But even if they do that doesn't mean they will use them on everyone, they probably keep the good stuff for the most valuable cases. Each use of an attack carries the risk of the attack vector being discovered and prevented in the future. And besides, there are threat actors besides TLAs of the USA, Russia and China. If you use full disk en…

If I am ever traveling to US, I am wiping the system, installing a clean, stock Linux distribution without any encryption, keeping everything valuable at home.

Once I am behind the border, I am reinstalling the system with encryption, then proceed to download key material and other important stuff from home over the internet.

I am never letting anyone near my unlocked laptop and if I ever find it turned off e.g. while visiting office toilet, I just assume it has been infected with firmware level rootkit and I am wiping it without decrypting.

If it's removed from my sight during the border check, I assume the same, purchase a new one in a brick-and-mortar shop and sell the infected one when I am back home.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#217

Post by beng-nl »

bigiain wrote: post #202
dmbche wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean can you actually protect against the NSA? After Stuxnet, I fully trust that nation/state actors can infect whatever they put their mind to - I'd rather at least have control over my machine

If your adversary is a nation state, you've already lost. Which gives me another opportunity to quote from my favourite Usenix paper: "In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.…

Nitpick, this is a column written by James Mickens, not a published paper.

It is funny, true, and wise, though.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#218

Post by account42 »

palisade wrote: post #193
thwarted wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think understandably, everyone is concerned because it felt like an affront by MS against Linux. But, I don't think that was their thought process at all. Given Microsoft's history, it's hard to really be sure. It's been a quarter century since The Halloween Documents and Microsoft definitely gives the air of contributing to the open source ecosystem today, but giants like having a big moat to defend, and old hab…

There was nothing to be gained in this except ill will. Hanlon's Razor suggests they were in a hurry to fix a security issue and didn't dot their i's on checking for dual boot systems.

If you apply Hanlon's Razor to known malicious actors then the only one being stupid is you. In fact, it's a really bad heuristic for any corporation.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#219

Post by account42 »

sedatk wrote: post #194
userbinator wrote: post #186

Obviously people might screw up, but the spec included a way to revoke any signed components that turned out not to be trustworthy "trustworthy" according to who ? Remember that dystopia does not appear spontaneously, but steadily advances little-by-little. What's the summary? Microsoft (understandably) didn't want it to be possible to attack Windows by using a vulnerable version of grub that could be tricked into ex…

> Who is Microsoft to decide what others do on their machines? That would be an amazing rant had it only ended with "Sent from my iPhone". Since the Blaster worm incident two decades ago, we're in a new era where security at scale becomes the forefront responsibility of the companies developing the product. That includes writing more secure code, having more verifications in place, adopting more secure technologies,…

The Blaster rworm did not in fact make the whole earth fall apart. Stop scaremongering.

> When you have a billion devices running around the world

This is exactly the point: Microsoft does NOT have those billions of devices, their users do.

> CrowdStrike happened because one of the "user-empowering" features: ability to install kernel drivers on a machine.

Crowdstrike happened because the corpration behind it had direct control over the computers it was running on and the ability to install security updates without the user's consent. They even ignored configuration that was supposed to delay updates for critical machines. Spinning this as some kind of failure of user empowerment instead of a consequence of the same kind of ownership inversion that secure boot and other DRM brings is absurd.

> at scale defaults must always prefer security over capability

And that's exactly how you end up in a dystopia. Because the demand for increased security never ands and can be used to justify any and all loss of freedom.

Re: What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

#220

Post by akira2501 »

mjevans wrote: post #147
pjc50 wrote: post #49

Something seems to be wrong with the whole security model. > those versions of grub had genuine security vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to compromise the Windows secure boot chain This feels like a "my secure compartments are all connected together" moment. If Microsoft want to verify that they're in an all-Microsoft boot chain, sure, whatever, fine. But somehow the compromise of any loader allows compr…

It was never designed to Empower the (end) User. This is vaguely the experience that should have been present in an Empowered User centric BIOS. First cold boot; BIOS verifies the hardware isn't broken, checks for a boot preference, finds none. Present the User with a set of choices: Check for BIOS Updates (manufacturer), Check for OS Choices (manufacturer), Begin installing an OS (options list). Locally cached (pres…

The best BIOS would be no BIOS, just find a drive, check for a boot sector, then boot from it. Have an internal USB slot that always gets boot priority for service and for advanced use cases.

The point of personal computers is to make _personal_ computing easy. Everything else can just be an add on.

Post reply on HN