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

  • tomalley8342@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    5 hours ago

    How is systemd somehow taking away freedoms at the behest of corporations who asked such a thing?

    RedHat putting their thumb on the scale providing full time engineers on this project to gain market share and become the defacto standard that they control doesn’t sound like a problem? How do you feel about what chromium is doing to the web?

    UEFI is an open standard, buddy. Microsoft is the only player fucking that up

    Microsoft is the only player “fucking that up” right. And the other corporations have some sort of god-given goodness to them that make it impossible for them to follow suit?

    “Trusted Computing” has existed in the very hardware you own and run for almost 30 years now. Literally nobody but cellphone makers use it in the way you describe. Seems you’re still using it though, so nobody seems to have made the apocalyptic decisions that bring your fearful future to bear.

    Nobody but (half of the entire consumer device market) use it in the way described, and this company comes in offering tools to do the same thing to the other half, and you don’t see the problem?

    A “Trusted Computing” framework - and this is how I know you don’t understand any of this - is only present. It takes software to interact with it to “take your freedoms away” as you put it.

    Software that these people are developing.

    “…we just provide the tools…”. MY GOD. Where do I even start with this? I can name about a hundred different FOSS tools that break encryption. You mad at the people who made the FOSS encryption tools, or the ones who the FOSS tools to decrypt it?

    I’m wary of the people that provide turn key solutions to deploy it at scale

    The only people who want this are people make and produce hardware platforms that ship out into the world so they can ensure they are T2B secure. It seems you don’t know much about security, so I’ll let you in a little secret…(If it claims to be secure, it means there are hardware controls in place)

    And if the user (that’s what we call the person who owns the device, if you don’t know much about these things) doesn’t want it?

      • tomalley8342@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        5 hours ago

        I unfortunately accept the reality of our corporate dominated technology landscape, I’m just confused about your downright enthusiasm for the same.

          • tomalley8342@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            This entire announcement is literally about an creation of a for-profit company to deliver hardware attestation in linux as a product 🤣

            • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              5 hours ago

              Again…read what the guy is saying. You can’t do something like this without BOTH the OSS community AND a company to back it up. It’s just not possible for legal reasons, financial reasons, and so on. The aim is to replace the existing bullshit Microsoft created, and make an open standard that is backed by a presence that keeps it there. Not something you can just fund and keep moving in a git repo alone.

              • tomalley8342@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                4 hours ago

                Why are you telling me “It can’t be done without corporate involvement” like it’s some kind of persuasive point 😭