551–560 of 770 posts
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Can I build my own kernel and still use software that wants attestation?
Do you have a way to tell the software to trust your kernel? If so, yes. Things like the web show how we can achieve distributed trust.
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Anonymous-attestation protocols are well known in cryptography, and some are standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Anonymous_Attestation
But what's it attesting? Their byline "Every system starts in a verified state and stays trusted over time" should be "Every system starts in a verified state of 8,000 yet-to-be-discovered vulns and stays in that vulnerable state over time". The figure is made up but see for example https://tuxcare.com/blog/the-linux-kernel-cve-flood-continue... . So what you're attesting is that all the bugs are still present, not t…
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"Ubuntu Core" is a similar product [1] As I understand it, the main customers for this sort of thing are companies making Tivo-style products - where they want to use Linux in their product, but they want to lock it down so it can't be modified by the device owner. This can be pretty profitable; once your customers have rolled out a fleet of hardware locked down to only run kernels you've signed. [1] https://ubuntu.c…
This sounds like a net negative for the end user
That is why Ubuntu Core (and similar) exist. More secure, better update strategy, lower net cost. I don't agree with the licensing or pricing model, but there are perfectly good technical reasons to use it.
Entities other than me being able to control what runs on the device I physically posses is absolutely not acceptable in any way. Screw your clients, screw you shareholders and screw you.
In the great scheme of things, this period where systemd was intentionally designed and developed and funded to hurt your autonomy but seemed temporarily innocuous will be a rounding error.
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You are trying to portrait it as an exchange between equal parties which it isn't. I am totally entitled not to have to use a thrid-party-controlled device to access government services. Or my bank account.
remote attestation is just fancy digital signatures with hardware protected secret keys. Are you freaking out about digital signatures used anywhere else?
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anyone who thinks that pipewire - pipewire! - is "a simple solution" understands nothing about pipewire. don't get me wrong, i use pipewire all day every day, and wrote one of the APIs (JACK) that it implements (pretty well, too!). but pipewire is an order of magnitude more complex than pulseaudio.
As an end user hand assembling desktop services on non-Systemd distros (Artix, Devuan, Gentoo, Guix) over the years, and thus had no concern about APIs, Pipewire just works and PulseAudio gave endless trouble. My 0.02 bits.
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.
Like John Deere. Read about how they use that sort of thing
Well I was wondering when the war on general computing and computer ownership would be carried into the heart of the open source ecosystems. Sure, there are sensible things that could be done with this. But given the background of the people involved, the fact that this is yet another clear profit-first gathering makes me incredibly pessimistic. This pessimism is made worse by reading the answers of the founders here…
Of course, we’ll see if anybody is actually engaging with this idea in good faith when it all gets rolled out. Because the bank has full end-to-end control over the device, authentication will be fully their responsibility and the (basically bullshit in the first place) excuse of “your identity was stolen,” will become not-a-thing.
Obviously I would not pay for such a device (and will always have a general purpose computer that runs my own software), but if the bank or Netflix want to send me a locked down terminal to act as a portal to their services, I guess I would be fine with using it to access (just) their services.