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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

#641

Post by jofla_net »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #596
garaetjjte wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

All this theatre is turning out to be nothing more than giving up the agency we have today (nice things), for a risk averse kneejerk runaround with glaring ulterior motives...just like the scan your face+id push for services.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#642

Post by NekkoDroid »

plagiarist wrote: post #617
NekkoDroid wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do I have nsresourced work in a regular systemd service or quadlet so that I can have an ephemeral user run a container? I am trying to find information and just seeing it as part of nsspawn, that seems to require a container specifically built around a root filesystem. I am not going to struggle with systemd if I have to build containers specifically for it. If I have to rearrange everything I am doing I would j…

nspawn containers aren't really any different to regular system images/archives other than they don't need a kernel.

I don't think the setting is exposed to regular service units (it might be able to in the future, I don't know) and I don't think podman has any integration with it.

What kinda service do you have where you need a full range of UIDs?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#643

Post by prima-facie »

cyphar wrote: post #51
josephcsible wrote: post #39

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…

> The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys.

FOR NOW. Policies and laws always change. Corporations and governments somehow always find ways to work against their people, in ways which are not immediately obvious to the masses. Once they have a taste of this there's no going back.

Please have a hard and honest think on whether you should actually build this thing. Because once you do, the genie is out and there's no going back.

This WILL be used to infringe on individual freedoms.

The only question is WHEN? And your answer to that appears to be 'Not for the time being'.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#644

Post by charcircuit »

direwolf20 wrote: post #628
charcircuit wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with remote attestation. Not all implementations are actually secure. But hopefully over time those security bugs can be ironed out and the cost to extract a key be made infeasable.

Hopefully not. What you have just said is a synonym for "But hopefully over time manufacturers will be able to completely prevent users from running unapproved software."

In the case of video game consoles that could be the case. It turned out that being able to run unapproved software results mainly in people playing pirated games. These security measures are reactive to the actions other people have taken. We already experimented with computing being the wild west where there was little to no security. It turned out that bad actors will abuse anything they can find. Even if it's not economical some attackers will still cause abuse.

There's always going to be a market for computers that can run unapproved software. I don't see that going away.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#645

Post by mrguyorama »

UltraSane wrote: post #487
alextingle wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I'm not having sex with my bank.

You do know what analogies are, right?

A fundamentally flawed way to make an argument?

Yeah I know what analogies are.

Why does my bank need to know whether the machine in my hands that is accessing their internet APIs was attested by some uninvolved third party or not?

You know we used to hand people pieces of paper with letters and numbers on them to do payments right? For some reason, calling up my bank on the phone never required complicated security arrangements.

TD Bank never needed to come inspect my phone lines to ensure nobody was listening in.

Instead of securing their systems and working on making it harder to have your accounts taken over (which by the way is a fruitful avenue of computer security with plenty of low hanging fruit) and punishing me for their failures, they want to be able to coerce me to only run certain software on my equipment to receive banking services.

This wasn't necessary for banking for literally thousands of years.

Why now? What justification is there?

A third party attesting my device can only be used to compel me to only use certain devices from certain third parties. The bank is not at all going to care whether I attest to it or not, they are going to care that Google or Microsoft will attest my device.

And for what? To what end? To prevent what alleged harm?

In what specific way does an attested device state make interacting with a publicly facing interface more secure?

It WILL be used to prevent you from being able to run certain code that benefits you at corporation's expense, like ad blockers.

Linux is supposed to be an open community. Who even asked for this?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#646

Post by ingohelpinger »

direwolf20 wrote: post #622
ingohelpinger wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the clarification and to be clear, I don't doubt your personal intent or FOSS background. The concern isn't bad actors at the start, it's how projects evolve once they matter. History is pretty consistent here: WhatsApp: privacy-first, founders with principles, both left once monetization and policy pressure kicked in. Google: 'Don’t be evil' didn’t disappear by accident — it became incompatible with scale…

Did AI write this comment?

nope. why?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#647

Post by magicalhippo »

jcgl wrote: post #612
magicalhippo wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that does not make sense, because it goes against the systemd documentation. Targets[1]: Target units do not offer any additional functionality on top of the generic functionality provided by units. They merely group units, allowing a single target name to be used in Wants= and Requires= settings to establish a dependency on a set of units defined by the target, and in Before= and After= settings to establish ord…

That seems like a fair point about the documentation! As far as I can see, you're right.

So that's why I find his statements disturbing.

If he really don't want targets to deliver failed/success guarantees, then they've massively miscommunicated in their documentation. That in my book is a huge deal.

In either case the issue should in no circumstance be casually dismissed as not-a-bug without further action.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#648

Post by fc417fc802 »

charcircuit wrote: post #629
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…

How does it solve MITM? You type your hardware token in and then an attacker uses it to send money out of your account. >What exactly is the concern here? Stealer malware. Or even RATs where attackers get notified when you open a sensitive app and they can take over after you have authenticated.

Could you please spell out the specifics of this scenario?

MitM via an evil (ie incorrect) domain name is prevented because U2F (and now webauthn or CTAP2) are origin bound.

RATs? On stock android? How does that work? And how are the things you describe not also threats for online banking via a browser? It's certainly not how the vast majority of attacks take place in the wild. Can you provide any examples of such an attack (ie malware as opposed to phishing) that was widespread? Otherwise I assume we're writing a script for Hollywood here.

Even then, a RAT could be trivially defeated by requiring a second one-off token authentication for any transaction that would move money around. I doubt there'd be much objection to such a policy. If people really hate it let them opt out below an amount of their choosing by signing a liability waiver.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#649

Post by direwolf20 »

stackghost wrote: post #602
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…

The bank thing is a smoke screen. This entire shit storm is 100% driven by the music, film, and tv industries, who are desperate to eke a few more millions in profit from the latest Marvel snoozefest (or whatever), and who tried to argue with a straight face that they were owed more than triple the entire global GDP [0]. These people are the enemy. They do not care about about computing freedom. They don't care about…

HN is for the kind of hacker who makes the next Uber or AirBNB. It's strongly aligned with the interests of corporate shareholders.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#650

Post by ingohelpinger »

mkeeter wrote: post #501
ingohelpinger wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m skeptical about the push toward third-party hardware attestation for Linux kernels. Handing kernel trust to external companies feels like repeating mistakes we’ve already seen with iOS and Android, where security mechanisms slowly turned into control mechanisms. Centralized trust Hardware attestation run by third parties creates a single point of trust (and failure). If one vendor controls what’s “trusted,” Linux…

oh hi ChatGPT The giveaway is that LLMs love bulleted lists with a bolded attention-grabbing phrase to start each line. Copy-pasting directly to HN has stripped the bold formatting and bullets from the list, so the attention-grabbing phrase is fused into the next sentence, e.g. “Potential for abuse Attestation enables blacklisting”

Calling this a "giveaway" is kind of hilarious. LLMs use bulleted lists because humans have always used bulleted lists—in RFCs, design docs, and literally every tech write-up ever. Structure didn't suddenly become artificial in 2023. lol.
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