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No personal attacks on HN, please.
Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
221–230 of 770 posts
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Secure boot and attestation both generally require a form of DRM. They literally don't. For a decade, I worked on secure boot & attestation for a device that was both: - firmware updatable - had zero concept or hardware that connected it to anything that could remotely be called a network
Interesting. So what did the attestation say once I (random Internet user) updated the firmware to something I wrote or compiled from another source?
> Interesting. So what did the attestation say once I (random Internet user) updated the firmware to something I wrote or compiled from another source?
The update is predicated on a valid signature.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remote attestation is literally a form of DRM Let's say I accept this statement. What makes you think trusted boot == remote attestation?
Trusted boot is literally a form of DRM. A different one than remote attestation.
> Trusted boot is literally a form of DRM. A different one than remote attestation.
No, it's not. (And for that matter, neither is remote attestation)
You're conflating the technology with the use.
I believe that you have only thought about these technologies as they pertain to DRM, now I'm here to tell you there are other valid use cases.
Or maybe your definition of "DRM" is so broad that it includes me setting up my own trusted boot chain on my own hardware? I don't really think that's a productive definition.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#224My only experience with Linux secure boot so far.... I wasn't even aware that it was secure booted. And I needed to run something (I think it was the Displaylink driver) that needs to jam itself into the kernel. And the convoluted process to do it failed (it's packaged for Ubuntu but I was installing it on a slightly outdated Fedora system). What, this part is only needed for secure boot? I'm not sec... oh. So go bac…
Secure Boot only extends the chain of trust from your firmware down the first UEFI binary it loads. Currently SB is effectively useless because it will at best authenticate your kernel but the initrd and subsequent userspace (including programs that run as root) are unverified and can be replaced by malicious alternatives. Secure Boot as it stands right now in the Linux world is effectively an annoyance that’s only t…
you can merge the initrd + kernel into one signed binary pretty easily with systemd-boot
add luks root, then it's not that bad
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#225First thing that comes to mind is anti cheat software. Would that be something solved if these objectives are achieved?
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#226amutable -k
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#227This seems like the kind of technology that could make the problem described in https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html a lot worse. Do you have any plans for making sure it doesn't get used for that?
I'm Aleksa, one of the founding engineers. We will share more about this in the coming months but this is not the direction nor intention of what we are working on. The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys. This is not just a matter of user freedom, in practice being able to do this is far more preferable for enterprises with strict security controls. I…
that’s great that you’ll let users have their own certificates and all, but the way this will be used is by corporations to lock us out into approved Linux distributions. Linux will be effectively owned by RedHat and Microsoft, the signing authority.
it will be railroaded through in the same way that systemD was railroaded onto us.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#228Remote attestation is another technology that is not inherently restrictive of software freedom. But here are some examples of technologies that have already restricted freedom due to oligopoly combined with network effects: * smartphone device integrity checks (SafetyNet / Play Integrity / Apple DeviceCheck) * HDMI/HDCP * streaming DRM (Widevine / FairPlay) * Secure Boot (vendor-keyed deployments) * printers w/ sign…
It's interesting there's no remote attestation the other way around, making sure the server is not doing something to your data that you didn't approve of.
confidential computing?
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#229Remote attestation is another technology that is not inherently restrictive of software freedom. But here are some examples of technologies that have already restricted freedom due to oligopoly combined with network effects: * smartphone device integrity checks (SafetyNet / Play Integrity / Apple DeviceCheck) * HDMI/HDCP * streaming DRM (Widevine / FairPlay) * Secure Boot (vendor-keyed deployments) * printers w/ sign…
It's interesting there's no remote attestation the other way around, making sure the server is not doing something to your data that you didn't approve of.
There is. Signal uses it, for example. https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/
For another example, IntegriCloud: https://secure.integricloud.com/
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#230Been wanting this ever since doing it in Fuchsia. Really excited to see added focus and investment in this for the Linux ecosystem.