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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

#591

Post by fc417fc802 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #571
bee_rider wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do sort of wonder if there’s room in my life for a small attested device. Like, I could actually see a little room for my bank to say “we don’t know what other programs are running on your device so we can’t actually take full responsibility for transactions that take place originated from your device,” and if I look at it from the bank’s point of view that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Of course, we’ll see if anybody…

I suggested this as a possible solution in another HN thread a while back, but along the lines of "If a bank wants me to have a secure, locked down terminal to do business with them, then they should be the ones forking it over, not commanding control of my owned personal device." It would quickly get out of hand if every online service started to do the same though. But, if remote device attestation continues to be…

Why should I need a separate device? Doesn't a hardware security token suffice? I wouldn't even mind bringing my own but my bank doesn't accept them last I checked. (Do any of them?)

If the bank can't be bothered to either implement support for U2F or else clearly articulate why U2F isn't sufficient then they don't have a valid position. Anything else they say on the matter should be disregarded.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#592

Post by charcircuit »

noisy_boy wrote: post #508
charcircuit wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptops already ship secure boot.

I can turn that crap off. For now.

Do you really think Laptop makers would buy a whole company to figure out how to remove that option?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#593

Post by drdaeman »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #585
drdaeman wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you (or someone) please tell what’s the point, for a regular GNU/Linux user, of having this thing you folks are working on? I can understand corporate use case - the person with access to the machine is not its owner, and corporation may want to ensure their property works the way they expect it to be. Not something I care about, personally. But when it’s a person using their own property, I don’t quite get the p…

The value is being able to easily and robustly verify that my device hasn't been compromised. Binding disk encryption keys to the TPM such that I don't need to enter a password but an adversary still can't get at the contents without a zero day. Of course you can already do the above with secure boot coupled with a CPU that implements an fTPM. So I can't speak to the value of this project specifically, only build and…

I don’t think attestation can provide such guarantees. To best of my understanding, it won’t protect from any RCE, and it won’t protect from malicious updates to configuration files. It won’t let me run arbitrary binaries (putting a nail to any local development), or if it will - it would be a temporary security theater (as attackers would reuse the same processes to sign their malware). IDSes are sufficient for this purpose, without negative side effects.

And that’s why I said “not a security mechanism”. Attestation is for protecting against actors with local hardware access. I have FDE and door locks for that already.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#594

Post by charcircuit »

trelane wrote: post #528
charcircuit wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptops already ship secure boot.

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

I hope you are mistaken. It's embarrassing how far behind in security the desktop Linux ecosystem is.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#595

Post by ahepp »

microthief wrote: post #445
ahepp wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://0pointer.net/blog/authenticated-boot-and-disk-encryp... Yes, system data should be locked to the system with a TPM. That way your system can refuse to boot if it's been modified to steal your user secrets.

And if Linux$oft suddenly decides every user's system needs a backdoor or that every system mus automatically phone home with your entire browsing data, then, well, too bad, so sad of course! Jesus.

Unless you're one of the 0.00000000001% of humans using a farm-to-table laptop with coreboot, what's stopping that from happening today?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#596

Post by AnthonyMouse »

garaetjjte wrote: post #544
UltraSane wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote attestation absolutely provides increased security. Mobile banking fraud rates are substantially lower than desktop/browser banking fraud. Attestation is major reason why. I think ever compute professional needs to spend at least a year trying to secure a random companies windows network to appreciate how impossible this actually is without hardware based roots of trust like TPMs and HSMs

>Attestation is major reason why. It's not. Mobile applications just don't have unrestricted access to everything in your user directory, attestation have nothing to do with it.

It's not even that. The main reason is probably that attackers are going to be writing code to automate their attacks, and desktops are easier to develop on than phones, so that's what they use with no reason to do otherwise.

Even if you stopped supporting desktops, then they would just reverse engineer the mobile app instead of the web app and extract the attestation keys from any unpatched model of phone and still run their code on a server, and then it would show up as "mobile fraud" because they're pretending to be a phone instead of a desktop, when in reality it was always a server rather than a phone or a desktop.

And even if attestation actually worked (which it doesn't), that still wouldn't prevent fraud, because it only tries to prove that the person requesting the transfer is using a commercial device. If the user's device is compromised then it doesn't matter if it can pass attestation because the attacker is only running the fake, credential stealing "bank app" on the user's device, not the real bank app. Then they can run the official bank app on an official device and use the stolen credentials to transfer the money. The attestation buys you nothing.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#597

Post by sophacles »

thewebguyd wrote: post #571
bee_rider wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do sort of wonder if there’s room in my life for a small attested device. Like, I could actually see a little room for my bank to say “we don’t know what other programs are running on your device so we can’t actually take full responsibility for transactions that take place originated from your device,” and if I look at it from the bank’s point of view that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Of course, we’ll see if anybody…

I suggested this as a possible solution in another HN thread a while back, but along the lines of "If a bank wants me to have a secure, locked down terminal to do business with them, then they should be the ones forking it over, not commanding control of my owned personal device." It would quickly get out of hand if every online service started to do the same though. But, if remote device attestation continues to be…

> with little issue

Citation needed. The fact that the infosec industry just keeps growing YoY kinda suggests that there are in fact issues that are more expensive than paying the security companies.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#598

Post by blueflow »

ahepp wrote: post #586
blueflow wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and it will also refuse to boot if it has been modified by the user. Preventing this was the reason we had free software in the first place.

Increasing security for the system owner will necessarily decrease the ability of others to modify the system in ways the owner doesn't like.

With "owner" not being the legal owner, but Microsoft.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#599

Post by NekkoDroid »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #585
drdaeman wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you (or someone) please tell what’s the point, for a regular GNU/Linux user, of having this thing you folks are working on? I can understand corporate use case - the person with access to the machine is not its owner, and corporation may want to ensure their property works the way they expect it to be. Not something I care about, personally. But when it’s a person using their own property, I don’t quite get the p…

The value is being able to easily and robustly verify that my device hasn't been compromised. Binding disk encryption keys to the TPM such that I don't need to enter a password but an adversary still can't get at the contents without a zero day. Of course you can already do the above with secure boot coupled with a CPU that implements an fTPM. So I can't speak to the value of this project specifically, only build and…

> For example I have no idea what they mean by the bullet "runtime integrity".

This is for example dm-verity (e.g. `/usr/` is an erofs partiton with matching dm-verity). Lennart always talks about either having files be RW (backed by encryption) or RX (backed by kernel signature verification).

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#600

Post by NekkoDroid »

plagiarist wrote: post #537
mikkupikku wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He really will just close a ticket because he disagrees with how Linux works. I read about systemd sysusers and thought they would be neat for running containerized services. But Poettering doesn't like the /etc/subuid files and refuses to work with them.

Well, he specifically doens't like the static allocation of subuids. There is a reason `systemd-nsresourced` exists.
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