Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

amutable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 770 posts

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#631

Post by direwolf20 »

UltraSane wrote: post #434
cwillu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It very clearly is restrictive of software freedom. I've never suffered from an evil maid breaking into my house to access my computer, but I've _very_ frequently suffered from corporations trying to prevent me from doing what I wish with my own things. We need to push back on this notion that this sort of thing was _ever_ for the end-user's benefit, because it's not.

YOU can use remote attestation to verify a remote server you are paying for hasn't been tampered with.

This happens much less frequently than the manufacturer of "my" computing device verifies that I haven't tampered with it. On net, it's a wholesale destruction of user freedom.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#632

Post by ahepp »

modo_mario wrote: post #460
esjeon wrote: 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.

I'm not too big in this field but didn't many of those same IOT companies and the like struggle with the packages becoming dependent on Poeterings work since they often needed much smaller/minimal distros?

I work on embedded devices, fairly powerful ones to be fair, and I think systemd is really great, useful software. There's a ton of stuff I can do quite easily with systemd that would take a ton of effort to do reliably with sysvinit.

It's definitely pretty opinionated, and I frequently have to explain to people why "After=" doesn't mean "Wants=", but the result is way more robust than any alternative I'm familiar with.

If you're on a system so constrained that running systemd is a burden, you are probably already using something like buildroot/yocto and have a high degree of control about what init system you use.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#633

Post by thewebguyd »

bee_rider wrote: post #624
fc417fc802 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, a hardware token will suffice to thwart both phising and MitM which covers ~everything for all practical threat and liability models. What exactly is the concern here? A widespread worm that no one is yet aware of that's dumping people's bank accounts into crypto? It might make for a decent Hollywood plot but is pulling that off actually easier than attacking the bank directly? Keep in mind that the…

Hypothetically on a fully controlled system you could prevent attacks like the sort of “hello this is Microsoft, we’ve identified a virus on your device, please download teamviewer and login to your bank account so we can clear it for you” type spam calls. Or, hasn’t there been malware that periodically takes screenshots of the device? Or maybe that’s a Hollywood plot, I forget actually.

> hasn’t there been malware that periodically takes screenshots of the device?

Yeah, it's called Recall and its baked into Windows as a "feature."

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#634

Post by fc417fc802 »

bee_rider wrote: post #624
fc417fc802 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, a hardware token will suffice to thwart both phising and MitM which covers ~everything for all practical threat and liability models. What exactly is the concern here? A widespread worm that no one is yet aware of that's dumping people's bank accounts into crypto? It might make for a decent Hollywood plot but is pulling that off actually easier than attacking the bank directly? Keep in mind that the…

Hypothetically on a fully controlled system you could prevent attacks like the sort of “hello this is Microsoft, we’ve identified a virus on your device, please download teamviewer and login to your bank account so we can clear it for you” type spam calls. Or, hasn’t there been malware that periodically takes screenshots of the device? Or maybe that’s a Hollywood plot, I forget actually.

Keep in mind that a truly clueless user will most likely be running in a stock configuration. So long as that doesn't permit apps to tamper with one another (as is currently the case) there should be no issue. Google could even provide a toggle to officially root the phone and so long as flipping it wiped the device the problem would remain 99.9% solved because a scammer would be unable to pull the job off in one go.

By the time you reach the point that the user is doggedly following harmful step by step instructions over the course of multiple callbacks there is nothing short of a padded cell that can protect him from himself.

Unless you mean to suggest somehow screening such calls? A local LLM? Literal wiretapping via realtime upload to the cloud? If facing such a route society would likely be better off institutionalizing anyone victimized in such a manner.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#635

Post by prima-facie »

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…

I was hoping banks would turn to using Yubikeys/U2F for authentication/transaction signing, and not these Draconian measures.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#636

Post by fc417fc802 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #633
bee_rider wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically on a fully controlled system you could prevent attacks like the sort of “hello this is Microsoft, we’ve identified a virus on your device, please download teamviewer and login to your bank account so we can clear it for you” type spam calls. Or, hasn’t there been malware that periodically takes screenshots of the device? Or maybe that’s a Hollywood plot, I forget actually.

> hasn’t there been malware that periodically takes screenshots of the device? Yeah, it's called Recall and its baked into Windows as a "feature."

It's unfortunate because it's actually incredibly useful functionality. If only they hadn't packaged and marketed it in quite the way they did. If there was ever a feature that needed to be guaranteed local only, zero third party integration, zero first party analytics, encryption tied to a TPM that was it.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#637

Post by mrguyorama »

direwolf20 wrote: post #248
jacquesm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ambition does really weird things to people. But I'm sure in this case when they achieve some kind of dominant position and Microsoft offers to re-absorb them they will do the honorable thing.

When has that ever happened in the entire human history?

People do the honorable thing all the time.

These people don't, but people you've never heard of are always doing honorable things.

Might be some sort of connection there.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#638

Post by coppsilgold »

georgyo wrote: post #489
arianvanp wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

The idea behind blind signatures is that the server will give you a signed token which is blinded and you can un-blind it on your end and then use it. The consumer of the token will not be able to collude with the issuer of the token to figure out who it was given to. There is more info here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-the-math/>

I don't know if that's what Apple actually does. If it is, once it gets popular enough as an anti-bot measure there may be farms of Apple devices selling these tokens. It's a separate system from remote attestation anyhow.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#639

Post by jofla_net »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #609
mariusor wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If the user's device isn't compromised then everything is fine regardless of whether or not it can pass attestation. If the user's device is compromised, the device doesn't need to pass attestation to run a fake bank app and steal the user's credentials. Once the attacker has the user's credentials they can use them to transfer money regardless of whether or not they have to use a different device that can pass attes…

My head hurts now...

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#640

Post by smm11 »

braincat31415 wrote: post #352
blibble wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use debian pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly this isn't some hacked u…

For me, randomly missing NFS mounts after boot were the last straw. I could not solve this problem. I am back on sysv init.

This. If you set an NFS share, it better be there forever and ever.
Post reply on HN