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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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can it sets terms on my religious and political views? I'm not speaking about race and sex, you cannot choose them (ok, sex you could in some jurisdictions, and there is difference between sex and gender, please, don't be nitpicky here), but about things I can choose same as I can choose my hardware and software to run.

If there is real effective market (which is not in any country on Earth, especially for banks), you could say: vote with you money, choose bank which suits you. But it is impossible even with bakery, less with banks on market which is strictly regulated (in part as result of lobbying by established institutions, to protect themselves!).

So, on one hand, I must use banks (I cannot pay for many things in cash, here, where I live most of bars and many shops doesn't accept cash, for example, and it is result of government politics and regulations), and on other hand banks is not seen as essential as access to air and water, they could dictate any terms they want.

I see this situation completely screwed.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And you cannot remove it on every motherboard because some of the firmware blobs are signed. You cannot remove their keys and leave only your own.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#523
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you running this particular unit file as a user unit or a system unit? Some targets like network-online.target don't work from user unit files. You could also try targeting NetworkManager or networkd's "wait-online" services. Or if that doesn't work, something is telling systemd that you have an IP when you don't. NetworkManager has "ipv4.may-fail" and "ipv6.may-fail" that might be errenously true. > at that poin…

it's a system service file the problem is systemd > The difference is that systemd is much better at ensuring correctness. yeah, whatever mate

Seems like you have an axe to grind with systemd because it replaced your familiar (but extremely cruddy) init system and now you refuse to debug the problem because you prefer being able to blame systemd.

There is so much granularity and flexibility in what you can do it seems rather unlikely you cannot make it happen correctly. And if it is truly a bug... open an issue? They're rather responsive to it. And it isn't like the legacy init systems were bug free from inception (well, lord knows they were still chock full of bugs even when they were replaced).

Edit: sitting here with a grin .. HN downvoting the advice of checking logs, debugging and opening an issue. I wish the companies y'all work at good luck.. they'll need it.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#524
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…

Glad to hear it! I am not surprised given the names and the fact you're at FOSDEM.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#525
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

it's the "usually" that's the problem this service (untouched by me) had: After=local-fs.target network-online.target remote-fs.target time-sync.target but it was still started without an IP address, and then failed to bind just like this sort of problem: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880#issuecomment-... the entire thing is unreliable and doesn't act like you'd expect > Or you can do something with Exec…

> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880

I'm not a systemd hater or anything, but I continue to read stuff from Poettering which to me is deeply disturbing given the programs he works on.

Saying it's not a bug that service is launched despite a stated required prerequisite dependency failed... WTF?

Sure, I agree with him that most computers should probably boot despite NTP being unable to sync. But proposing that the solution to that is breaking Requires is just wild to me.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#526
post #46

The typical HN rage-posting about DRM aside, there's no reason that remote attestation can't be used in the opposite direction: to assert that a server is running only the exact code stack it claims to be, avoiding backdoors. This can even be used with fully open-source software, creating an opportunity for OSS cloud-hosted services which can guarantee that the OSS and the build running on the server match. This is a…

it doesn't stop remote code injection. Protecting boot path is frankly hardly relevant on server compared to actual threats. You will get 10000 zero days before you get a single direct attack at hardware

The idea is that by protecting boot path you build a platform from which you can attest the content of the application. The goal here is usually that a cloud provider can say “this cryptographic material confirms that we are running the application you sent us and nothing else” or “the cloud application you logged in to matched the one that was audited 1:1 on disk.”

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#527

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…

On the other side, Mulvad is looking at remote attestation so that the users can verify their servers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903695

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#528

Do you plan to sell this technology to laptop makers so their laptops will only run the OS they came with?

Laptops already ship secure boot.

Not all. The ones that ship Linux preinstalled and with support don't.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#529
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Linux has been majority developed by large tech companies for the last 20+ years. If not for them, it would not be anywhere close to where it is today. You may not like this fact, but it's not really a new development nor something that can be described as infiltration. At the end of the day, maintaining software without being paid to do so is not generally sustainable.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daan here, founding engineer and systemd maintainer. So we try to make every new feature that might be disruptive optional in systemd and opt-in. Of course we don't always succeed and there will always be differences in opinion. Also, we're a team of people that started in open source and have done open source for most of our careers. We definitely don't intend to change that at all. Keeping systemd a healthy project…

Hi Daan, Thanks for the answer. Let me ask you something close with a more blunt angle: Considering most of the tech is already present and shipping in the current systemd, what prevents our systems to become a immutable monolith like macOS or current Android with the flick of a switch? Or a more grave scenario: What prevents Microsoft from mandating removal of enrollment permissions for user keychains and Secure Boo…

> What prevents Microsoft from mandating removal of enrollment permissions for user keychains and Secure Boot toggle, hence every Linux distribution has to go through Microsoft's blessing to be bootable?

Why are you buying hardware that Microsoft controls if you're concerned about this?

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