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Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

amutable.com

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Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#61

Post by bayindirh »

bri3d wrote: 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…

You're absolutely right, but considering Windows requirements drive the PC spec, this capability can be used to force Linux distributions in bad ways.

So, some of the people doing "typical HN rage-posting about DRM" are also absolutely right.

The capabilities locking down macOS and iOS and related hardware also can be used for good, but they are not used for that.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#62

Post by NekkoDroid »

s_dev wrote: post #59
DaanDeMeyer wrote: post #54

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…

>We are building cryptographically verifiable integrity into Linux systems. Every system starts in a verified state and stays trusted over time. What problem does this solve for Linux or people who use Linux? Why is this different from me simply enabling encryption on the drive?

Drive encryption is only really securing your data at rest, not while the system is running. Ideally image based systems also use the kernels runtime integrity checking (e.g. dm-verity) to ensure that things are as they are expected to be.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#63

Post by 2b3a51 »

blixtra wrote: post #38
microtonal wrote: post #20

Really excited to a company investing into immutable and cryptographically verifiable systems. Two questions really: 1. How will the company make money? (You have probably been asked that a million times :).) 2. Similar to the sibling: what are the first bits that you are going to work on. At any rate, super cool and very nice that you are based in EU/Germany/Berlin!

1. We are confident we have a very robust path to revenue. 2. Given the team, it should be quite obvious there will be a Linux-based OS involved. Our aims are global but we certainly look forward to playing an important role in the European tech landscape.

"We are confident we have a very robust path to revenue."

I take it that you are not at this stage able to provide details of the nature of the path to revenue. On what kind of timescale do you envisage being able to disclose your revenue stream/subscribers/investors?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#64

Post by DaanDeMeyer »

bayindirh wrote: post #58
DaanDeMeyer wrote: post #54

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…

So adding all of this technology will certainly make it more easy to be used for either good or bad. And it will certainly become possible to build an OS that will be less hackable than your run of the mill Linux distro.

But we will never enforce using any of these features in systemd itself. It will always be up to the distro to enable and configure the system to become an immutable monolith. And I certainly don't think distributions like Fedora or Debian will ever go in that direction.

We don't really have any control over what Microsoft decides to do with Secure Boot. If they decide at one point to make Secure Boot reject any Linux distribution and hardware vendors prevent enrolling user owned keys, we're in just as much trouble as everyone else running Linux will be.

I doubt that will actually happen in practice though.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#65

Post by kfreds »

Exciting!

It sounds like you want to achieve system transparency, but I don't see any clear mention of reproducible builds or transparency logs anywhere.

I have followed systemd's efforts into Secure Boot and TPM use with great interest. It has become increasingly clear that you are heading in a very similar direction to these projects:

- Hal Finney's transparent server

- Keylime

- System Transparency

- Project Oak

- Apple Private Cloud Compute

- Moxie's Confer.to

I still remember Jason introducing me to Lennart at FOSDEM in 2020, and we had a short conversation about System Transparency.

I'd love to meet up at FOSDEM. Email me at fredrik@mullvad.net.

Edit: Here we are six years later, and I'm pretty sure we'll eventually replace a lot of things we built with things that the systemd community has now built. On a related note, I think you should consider using Sigsum as your transparency log. :)

Edit2: For anyone interested, here's a recent lightning talk I did that explains the concept that all project above are striving towards, and likely Amutable as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0gxBWwwQE

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#66

Post by bri3d »

bayindirh wrote: post #61
bri3d wrote: 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…

You're absolutely right , but considering Windows requirements drive the PC spec, this capability can be used to force Linux distributions in bad ways. So, some of the people doing "typical HN rage-posting about DRM" are also absolutely right . The capabilities locking down macOS and iOS and related hardware also can be used for good, but they are not used for that.

> but considering Windows requirements drive the PC spec, this capability can be used to force Linux distributions in bad ways

What do you mean by this?

Is the concern that systemd is suddenly going to require that users enable some kind of attestation functionality? That making attestation possible or easier is going to cause third parties to start requiring it for client machines running Linux? This doesn't even really seem to be a goal; there's not really money to be made there.

As far as I can tell the sales pitch here is literally "we make it so you can assure the machines running in your datacenter are doing what they say they are," which seems pretty nice to me, and the perversions of this to erode user rights are either just as likely as they ever were or incredibly strange edge cases.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#67

Post by 9NRtKyP4 »

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/ signed/chipped cartridges (consumables auth)

* proprietary file formats + network effects (office docs, messaging)

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#69

Post by direwolf20 »

microtonal wrote: post #50
direwolf20 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote attestation is literally a form of DRM

There are genuine positive applications for remote attestation. E.g., if you maintain a set of servers, you can verify that it runs the software it should be running (the software is not compromised). Or if you are running something similar to Apple's Private Compute Cloud to run models, users can verify that it is running the privacy-preserving image that it is claiming to be running. There are also bad forms of rem…

I agree that DRM feels good when you're the one controlling it.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#70

Post by devsda »

DaanDeMeyer wrote: post #54
devsda wrote: post #40

The immediate concern seeing this is will the maintainer of systemd use their position to push this on everyone through it like every other extended feature of systemd? Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't go the usual path of a minimal support, optional support and then being virtually mandatory by means of tight coupling with other subsystems.

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…

Thanks Daan for your contributions to systemd.

If you were not a systemd maintainer and have started this project/company independently targeting systemd, you would have to go through the same process as everyone and I would have expected the systemd maintainers to, look at it objectively and review with healthy skepticism before accepting it. But we cannot rely on that basic checks and balances anymore and that's the most worrying part.

> that might be disruptive optional in systemd

> we don't always succeed and there will always be differences in opinion.

You (including other maintainers) are still the final arbitrator of what's disruptive. The differences of opinion in the past have mostly been settled as "deal with it" and that's the basis of current skepticism.

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