Fitting Everything Together
0pointer.net
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering

The creator of systemd (Lennart Poettering) has recently created a new company dedicated to bringing hardware attestation to open source software.

What might this entail? A previous blog post could provide some clues:

So, let’s see how I would build a desktop OS. The trust chain matters, from the boot loader all the way to the apps. This means all code that is run must be cryptographically validated before it is run. This is in fact where big distributions currently fail pretty badly. This is a fault of current Linux distributions though, not of SecureBoot in general.

If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.

There are lots of others who are equally concerned about this possibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    74·
    7 hours ago

    Uhhhh…wha?

    This would be a big deal for hardware manufacturers or product manufacturers in securing their devices. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of Linux users are just desktop jockeys.

    • baronvonj@piefed.socialEnglish
      212·
      7 hours ago

      I was referring to this

      If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        5 hours ago

        What if the thing that you want is to have SecureBoot-enforced hardware attestation?

        • baronvonj@piefed.socialEnglish
          61·
          5 hours ago

          I guess you’re not thinking of “locked down” in terms of independent developers finding the iOS and Android “play by our rules and be distributed thru our app store or we’ll make it hard for users to run your software” to be a barrier to distribution.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
            23·
            4 hours ago

            Bruh…that’s not even the point of the company or what he’s talking about. You’re being paranoid, first off.

            Second, you want secure devices? You can’t have that right now with Linux very easily. There is no chain of trust coming from the hardware aside from TPM, which is kind of a joke. This guy wants to make a standard way of certifying a chain of trust which would allow an ecosystem of devices to maintain some semblance of trust amongst itself and other devices. This would make things like networks, edge devices, forward deployed hardware, and running sensitive data in less than secure locations more secure.

            Last, if you’re going to be paranoid, at least educate yourself on the subject. Not a single person who is even vaguely familiar with what this entails is thinking “Oh they’re going to lock all our devices rawrawrawr”. That’s just ridiculous. That could happen now, but…you seeing that out in the components world anywhere? Absolutely not. Because it’s no desirable, and that’s NOT WHAT HES EVEN TALKING ABOUT.

            🤦

            • Brummbaer@pawb.socialEnglish
              21·
              2 hours ago

              Sorry but this whole thing is just snake-oil.

              You can verify and sign your whole trust chain down to the last shared library and it doesn’t matter when you don’t know what the binary blobs on your TPM / CPU / BIOS / NIC are doing.

              The only guarantee to a secure system is openness an all of that signing won’t help you there.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
            34·
            4 hours ago

            Not even how that works FFS. You’re not the target audience here.

            Y’all really need to start reading more about things before jumping to ridiculously uninformed conclusions and making comments. My gosh.