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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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. We're probably witnessing the beginning of the end of linux users being able to run their own kernels. Soon: - your bank won't let you log in from an "insecure" device. - you won't be able to play videos on an "insecure" device. - you won't be able to play video games on an "insecure" device. And so on, and so forth.

This is already the world we live in when it comes to the most popular personal computing devices running Linux out there.

This is already the world you live in just running some recent Ubuntu. Try writing, building and loading a kernel module!

Of course its all nonsense make believe, the "trust root" is literally a Microsoft signed stub. For this dummy implementation you can't modify your own kernel anymore.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here is some actual security: encrypted /boot, encrypted everything other than the boot loader (grub in this case) sign grub with your own keys (some motherboards let you to do so). don't let random things signed by microsoft to boot (it defeats the whole point) so you have grub in an efi partition, it passes secure boot, loads, and attempts to unlock a luks partition with the user provided passphrase. if it passed s…

I’d much rather have tamper detection. Encryption is great should the device is stolen but it feels like the wrong tool for defending against evil maids. All I’d want is that any time you open the case or touch the cold external ports (ie unbolted) you have to re-authenticate with a master password. I’m happy to use cabled peripherals to achieve this. Chaining trust from POST to login feels like trying to make a theo…

Encryption is just a baseline. Nobody should have unencrypted personal computers.

You can have both full disk encryption AND a tamper protection!

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#473
post #337

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…

I’m not sure I understand the threat model for this. Why would I need to worry about my enclave being identifiable? Or is this a business use case? Or why buy used devices if this is a risk?

I assume the use case here is mostly for backend infrastructure rather than consumer devices. You want to verify that a machine has booted a specific signed image before you release secrets like database keys to it. If you can't attest to the boot state remotely, you don't really know if the node is safe to process sensitive data.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#474
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the non-distribution agnostic parts of systemd? Considering it runs as PID1 (usually) it kinda is the base of distros and not really built on top of any distro other than "the linux kernel".

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can merge the initrd + kernel into one signed binary pretty easily with systemd-boot add luks root, then it's not that bad

Yes, you can . I really don't want to be in the business of building OSes. If these guys make it so that getting reasonable boot security is a simple toggle, I'd be grateful.

On arch it isn't particularly difficult to create UKIs other than changing like 2 lines in `mkinitcpio`'s config.

Then there is also `ukify` by systemd which also can create UKIs, which then can be installed with `kernel-install`, but that is a bit more work to set up than for `mkinitcpio`.

The main part is the signing, which I usually have `sbctl` handle.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#476
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

This perspective is astonishingly historically ignorant, and ignores how "Open Source Software" was a deliberate political movement to simultaneously neuter the non-company-friendly goals of FOSS while simultaneously providing a competing (and politically distracting) movement that deliberately courted companies.

The Free Software movement was successful enough that by 1997 it was garnering a lot of international community support and manpower. Eric S. Raymond published CatB in response to these successes, partly with a goal of "celebrating its successes" — sendmail, gcc, perl, and Linux were all popular projects with a huge number of collaborators by this point — and partly with a goal of reframing the Free Software movement such that it effectively neuters the political basis (i.e. the four freedoms, etc.) in a company-friendly way. It's very easy to note when reading the book, how it consistently celebrates the successes of Free Software in a company friendly way, deliberately to make it appealing to companies. Often being very explicit about its goals, e.g. "Don't give your workers good bonuses, because research shows that the better a ''hacker'' the less they care about money!".

A year later, internal memos from Microsoft leaked that showed that management were indeed scared shitless about Linux, a movement that they could neither completely Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, nor practice Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt on, because the community that built it were too strong, and too dedicated. Management foresaw that it was only a matter until Linux was a very strong competitor — even if that's taken 20 years, they were decently accurate in their fears, and, to be honest, part of why it's taken 30 years for Linux to catch up are deliberate actions by Microsoft wrt. introducing and adopting technologies that would stymie the Free Software movement from being able to adapt.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#477
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life, I wouldn't put my name to something that would enable the kinds of issues you describe. Until you get acquired, receive a golden parachute and use it when realizing that the new direction does not align with your views anymore. But, granted, if all you do is FOSS then you will anyway have a hard time keeping evil actors from using your tech for evil things. Might as well g…

This whole discussion is a perfect example of what Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

A rational and intelligent engineer cannot possibly believe that he'll be able to control what a technology is used for after he creates it, unless his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#478
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…

That's not the intention, but how do you stop it from being the effect?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is systemd stopping you use cron?

systemd parses your crontab and runs the jobs inside on its own terms of course you can run Cron as well and run all your jobs twice in two different ways, but that's only pedantically possible as it's a completely useless way to do things.

> systemd parses your crontab and runs the jobs inside on its own terms

systemd itself only has 2 references to "crontab" in its entire codebase and both of those are in man-pages.

My educated guess is that some other package is installing a generator to generate systemd units out of the crontab (e.g. https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron)

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a silver lining the anti-user attestation will at least be full of security holes, and likely won't work at all

Dunno about the others but Pottering has proven himself to deliver software against the grain.

Poettering gas a track record of recognizing good ideas from Apple, then implementing them poorly. He also has a track record of closing bug reports for plain and simple bugs in his software to protect his own ego, and this kind of mentality isn't a great basis for security sensitive software.

Audio server for linux: Great idea! Pulseaudio: Genuinely a terrible implementation of it, Pipewire is a drop in replacement that actually works.

Launchd but for Linux: Great idea! SystemD: generally works now at least, but packed with insane defaults and every time this is brought up with the devs they say its the distro packagers jobs to wipe SystemD's ass and clean up the mess before users see it.

Security bug in SystemD when the user has a digit in their username: Lennart closes the bug and says that SystemD is perfect, the distros erred by permitting such usernames. Insane ego-driven response.

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