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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

#481

Post by curt15 »

cyphar wrote: post #51
josephcsible wrote: post #39

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…

> The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys.

If user control of keys becomes the linchpin for retaining full control over one's own computer, doesn't it become easy for a lobby or government to exert control by banning user-controlled keys? Today, such interest groups would need to ban Linux altogether to achieve such a result.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#482

Post by mikkupikku »

nextaccountic wrote: post #327
Nextgrid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> the reason I don't do it is.. my laptop is buggy. often when I enable secure boot, something periodically gets corrupted (often when the laptop powers off due to low power) and when it gets up, it doesn't verify anything. slightly insane tech

Reminds me of my old Chromebook Pixel I wiped chromeos from. Every time it booted I had to press Ctrl-L (iirc) to continue the boot, any other keypress would reenable secure boot and the only way I knew to recover from that was to reinstall chromeos, which would wipe my linux partition and my files with it. Needless to say, that computer taught me good backup discipline...

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#483

Post by wolvoleo »

esjeon wrote: post #436
cferry wrote: post #367

Please don't bring attestation to common Linux distributions. This technology, by essence, moves trust to a third party distinct of the user. I don't see how it can be useful in any way to end users like most of us here. Its use by corporations has already caused too much damage and exclusion in the mobile landscape, and I don't want folks like us becoming pariahs in our own world, just because we want machines we bo…

Attestation is a critical feature for many H/W companies (e.g. IoT, robotics), and they struggle with finding security engineers who expertise in this area (disclaimer: I used to work as a operating system engineer + security engineer). Many distros are not only designed for desktop users, but also for industrial uses. If distros ship standardized packages in this area, it would help those companies a lot.

This is the problem with Linux in general. It's way too much infiltrated by our adversaries from big tech industry.

Look at all the kernel patch submissions. 90% are not users but big tech drones. Look at the Linux foundation board. It's the who's who of big tech.

This is why I moved to the BSDs. Linux started as a grassroots project but turned commercial, the BSDs started commercial but are hardly still used as such and are mostly user driven now (yes there's a few exceptions like netflix, netgate, ix etc but nothing on the scale of huawei, Amazon etc)

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#484

Post by wolvoleo »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #383
cferry wrote: post #367

Please don't bring attestation to common Linux distributions. This technology, by essence, moves trust to a third party distinct of the user. I don't see how it can be useful in any way to end users like most of us here. Its use by corporations has already caused too much damage and exclusion in the mobile landscape, and I don't want folks like us becoming pariahs in our own world, just because we want machines we bo…

Please do, I disagree with this commenter. You already trust third parties, but there is no reason why that third party can't be the very same entity publishing the distribution. The role corporations play in attestation for the devices you speak of can be displaced by an open source developer, it doesn't need to require a paid certificate, just a trusted one. Furthermore, attestation should be optional at the hardwa…

It could be an open source developer yes but in practice it's always the big tech companies. Look at how this evolved in mobile phones.

It's also because content companies and banks want other people in suits to trust.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#486

Post by UltraSane »

blueflow wrote: post #462
UltraSane wrote: post #427

Trusted computing and remote attestation is like two people who want to have sex requiring clean STD tests first. Either party can refuse and thus no sex will happen. A bank trusting a random rooted smartphone is like having sex with a prostitute with no condom. The anti-attestation position is essentially "I have a right to connect to your service with an unverified system, and refusing me is oppression." Translate…

> You're just not entitled to have third parties trust that device with their systems and money. But its a bank, right? Its my money.

If malware on your phone steals it the bank could be on the hook. The bank can set terms on how you access their computers.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#487

Post by UltraSane »

alextingle wrote: post #452
UltraSane wrote: post #427

Trusted computing and remote attestation is like two people who want to have sex requiring clean STD tests first. Either party can refuse and thus no sex will happen. A bank trusting a random rooted smartphone is like having sex with a prostitute with no condom. The anti-attestation position is essentially "I have a right to connect to your service with an unverified system, and refusing me is oppression." Translate…

But I'm not having sex with my bank.

You do know what analogies are, right?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#488

Post by mariusor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #372
ahepp wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as you say, a lot of this stuff is already happening. Won’t it be good to have a FOSS attestation stack that breaks the iOS/android duopoly?

Banks don't use these things because they provide any real security. They use them because the platform company calls it a "security feature" and banks add "security features" to their checklists. The way you defeat things like that is through political maneuvering and guile rather than submission to their artificial narrative. Publish your own papers and documentation that recommends apps not support any device with…

Are you saying that attestation doesn't really provide any real security? Not even from the bank's point of view?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#489

Post by georgyo »

arianvanp wrote: post #451
coppsilgold wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anonymous-attestation protocols are well known in cryptography, and some are standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Anonymous_Attestation Which does exactly what I said. Full zero knowledge attestation isn't practical as a single compromised key would give rise to a service that would serve everyone. The solution first adopted by the TCG (TPM specification v1.1) required a trusted third-party, namely a…

Apple uses Blind Signatures for attestation. It's how they avoid captchas at CloudFlare and Fastly in their Private Relay product https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/private-access-tokens/

If I'm reading any of this correctly, this doesn't apply to hardware attestation.

It seems apple has a service, with an easily rotated key and an agreement with providers. If the key _Apple_ uses is compromised, they can rotate it.

BUT, apple knows _EXACTLY_ who I am. I attest to them using my hardware, they know _EXACTLY_ which hardware I'm using. They can ban me or my hardware. They then their centralized service gives me a blind token. But apple, may, still know exactly who owns which blind tokens.

However, I cannot generate blind tokens on my own. I _MUST_ talk to some centralized service that can I identify me. If that is not the case, then any single compromised device can generate infinite blind tokens rending all the tokens useless.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#490

Post by mariusor »

dijit wrote: post #158
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You think? It took us nearly a decade and a half to unfuck the pulseaudio situation and finally arrive at a simple solution (pipewire). SystemD has a lot more people refining it down but a clean (under the hood) implementation probably won't be witnessed in my lifetime.

It's baffling to me that anyone can imagine pipewire has been created from scratch without any lessons learned from pulseaudio and the previous issues the audio stack on linux had, and solved, over the years. Nothing is happening in a clean room bubble, every new project stands on the shoulders of giants...
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