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Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

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Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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.…

Banks do this because they have made their own requirement that the mobile device is a trust root that can authenticate the user. There are better, limited-purpose devices that can do this, but they are not popular/ubiquitous like smartphones, so here we are.

The oppressive part of this scheme is that Google's integrity check only passes for _their_ keys, which form a chain of trust through the TEE/TPM, through the bootloader and finally through the system image. Crucially, the only part banks should care about should just be the TEE and some secure storage, but Google provides an easy attestation scheme only for the entire hardware/software environment and not just the secure hardware bit that already lives in your phone and can't be phished.

It would be freaking cool if someone could turn your TPM into a Yubikey and have it be useful for you and your bank without having to verify the entire system firmware, bootloader and operating system.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#342

Remote 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.

I wish the myth of the spec would die at this point.

Many motherboards secure boot implimentation violates the supposed standard and does not allow you to invalidate the pre-loaded keys you don't approve of.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the fix for pulseaudio was to throw it away entirely for systemd, I don't think I have a single linux system that boots/reboots reliably 100% of the time these days

There were dozens of other init systems that, like systemd, wasn't a shell script. What set systemd apart is the collection of tightly integrated utilities such as a dns resolver, sntp client, core dump handler, rpc-like api linking to complex libraries in the hot path and so on and so forth that has been a constant stream of security exploits for over a decade now. This is a case where the critics were proven to be…

As predicted. I thought pulseaudio should have been enough of a lesson. Besides that, any person that works on open source but that joins Microsoft is not in the camp that should have a say in the overall direction of Linux.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#344

Remote attestation only works because your CPU's secure enclave has a private key burned-in (fused) into it at the factory. It is then provisioned with a digital certificate for its public key by the manufacturer. Every time you perform an attestation the public key (and certificate) is divulged which makes it a unique identifier, and one that can be traced to the point of sale - and when buying a used device, a poin…

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Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only parties that really cared about boot time were the big hosting providers and container schleppers. For desktop linux it never mattered as much.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#346
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Debian is a darling for which I will always love, but it's inability to deal with systemd is one of the prime reasons I left. I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL. It just works

That's because systemd originated at RedHat. If it had been designed distribution agnostic it would have worked a lot better on other distros besides RH.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#347
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, many options that are complicated beyond the understanding of the distro maintainers, and yet still don't allow expression of common semantics required to support network services reliably like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" and it's not esoteric, even ListenAddress with sshd doesn't even work reliably the ONLY piece of systemd I've not had problems with is systemd-boot, a…

> like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" "network-online.target is a target that actively waits until the network is “up”, where the definition of “up” is defined by the network management software. Usually it indicates a configured, routable IP address of some kind. Its primary purpose is to actively delay activation of services until the network has been set up." For time sync ch…

Sysadmins really hate the word "usually", and that is at the root of just about every systemd headache I've had

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "just as secure as proprietary OSes" who due to failed signature verification are no longer able to start notepad.exe. I think you might want to go re-read the last ~6 months of IT news in regards of "secure proprietary OSes".

Just because OpenSSL had a CVE posted about today, that didn't mean we should go back to use HTTP for the web.

It does mean we should recognize that SSL is nice for some basic privacy/security, but not perfect security.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#349
post #292

Well, I can see what heinous thing is going to be ruining my day in 5 years. Attestation, the thing we're going to be spending the next forever trying to get out of phones, now in your kernel.

It's interesting how quickly the OSS movement went from "No, no, we just want to include companies in the Free Software Movement" to "Oh, don't worry, it's ok if companies with shareholders that are not accountable to the community have a complete monopoly on OSS, and decide what direction it takes"

FOSS was imagined as a brotherhood of hackers, sharing code back and forth to build a utopian code commons that provided freedom to build anything. It stayed firmly in the realm of the imaginary because, in the real world, everybody wants somebody else to foot the bill or do the work. Corporations stepped up once they figured out how to profit off of FOSS and everyone else was content to free ride off of the output because it meant they didn't have to lift a finger. The people who actually do the work are naturally in the driver's seat.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#350
post #51

This 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…

You're providing mechanism, not policy. It's amazing how many people think they can forestall policies they dislike by trying to reject mechanisms that enable them. It's never, ever worked. I'm glad there are going to be more mechanisms in the world.
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