this is very interesting... been watching the work around bootc coupling with composefs + dm_verity + signed UKI, I'm wondering if this will build upon that.
Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
261–270 of 770 posts
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#262Remote 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…
> * Secure Boot (vendor-keyed deployments) I wish this myth would die at this point. Secure Boot allows you to enroll your own keys. This is part of the spec, and there are no shipped firmwares that prevents you from going through this process.
Android lets you put your own signed keys in on certain phones. For now.
The banking apps still won't trust them, though.
To add a quote from Lennart himself:
"The OS configuration and state (i.e. /etc/ and /var/) must be encrypted, and authenticated before they are used. The encryption key should be bound to the TPM device; i.e system data should be locked to a security concept belonging to the system, not the user."
Your system will not belong to you anymore. Just as it is with Android.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#263Remote 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 very clearly is restrictive of software freedom. I've never suffered from an evil maid breaking into my house to access my computer, but I've _very_ frequently suffered from corporations trying to prevent me from doing what I wish with my own things. We need to push back on this notion that this sort of thing was _ever_ for the end-user's benefit, because it's not.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think most people would be fine with their car ramming into a military base after an unfriendly firmware update.
However, I agree that the risks to individuals and their freedoms stemming from these technologies outweigh the benefits in most cases.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#264What is the endgame here? Obviously "heightened security" in some kind of sense, but to what end and what mechanisms? What is the scope of the work? Is this work meant to secure forges and upstream development processes via more rigid identity verification, or package manager and userspace-level runtime restrictions like code signing? Will there be a push to integrate this work into distributions, organizations, or t…
I suspect the endgame is confidential computing for distributed systems. If you are running high value workloads like LLMs in untrusted environments you need to verify integrity. Right now guaranteeing that the compute context hasn't been tampered with is still very hard to orchestrate.
That endgame has so far been quite unreachable. TEE.fail is the latest in a long sequence of "whoever touches the hardware can still attack you".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743756
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/intel-and-amd-trust...
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#265What is the endgame here? Obviously "heightened security" in some kind of sense, but to what end and what mechanisms? What is the scope of the work? Is this work meant to secure forges and upstream development processes via more rigid identity verification, or package manager and userspace-level runtime restrictions like code signing? Will there be a push to integrate this work into distributions, organizations, or t…
I suspect the endgame is confidential computing for distributed systems. If you are running high value workloads like LLMs in untrusted environments you need to verify integrity. Right now guaranteeing that the compute context hasn't been tampered with is still very hard to orchestrate.
No, the endgame is that a small handful of entities or a consortium will effectively "own" Linux because they'll be the only "trusted" systems. Welcome to locked-down "Linux".
You'll be free to run your own Linux, but don't expect it to work outside of niche uses.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#266I really hope this would be geared towards clients being able to verify the server state or just general server related usecases, instead of trying to replicate SafetyNet-style corporate dystopia on the desktop.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#267My 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…
There is some level of misinformation in your post. Both Windows and Linux check driver signatures. Once you boot Linux in UEFI Secure Boot, you cannot use unsigned drivers because the kernel can detect and activate the lockdown mode. You have to sign all of the drivers within the same PKI of your UEFI key.
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick is the same: use a popular linux distribution and don't fight the kinks. The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way. SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work t…
I only use debian pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly this isn't some hacked u…
"for what? to save a second of boot time"
Doubtful the motivation was /etc/rc being too slow
daemontools, runit, s6 solve that problem
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#269This 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…
So far, that's a slick way to say not really. You are vague where it counts, and surely you have a better idea of the direction than you say.
Attestation of what to whom for which purpose? Which freedom does it allow users to control their keys, how does it square with remote attestation and the wishes of enterprise users?
Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
#270To me this looks bad on so many levels. I hate it immediately.
One good news is that maybe LP will get less involved in systemd.