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In these days of containers, wouldn't it allow a government to coerce a container-hosting company into using an unsecure kernel? Such a kernel would see all tra

In these days of containers, wouldn't it allow a government to coerce a container-hosting company into using an unsecure kernel? Such a kernel would see all traffic, unencrypted... or did I miss something?

jo909 9y ago
Please don't believe for even a second that your container host can't already extract the cleartext just because the SSL is executed in the container context. A kernel facility like that certainly makes an attack even more obvious and maybe harder to detect. But if this is a concern you can't use external hosting. This applies to VMs too, the hypervisor can see and transparently modify everything going on. There is development going on with special CPU instructions that could prevent the hypervisor from reading VM memory, but that is not state of the art and I would not trust it for a long time. You can't even be really sure that a bare metal server you are renting is not extracting the cleartext via a modified bios/efi, bootloader etc, or modified hardware at the worst.
- weddpros 9y ago
  "that certainly makes it even more obvious": that's what I meant... easy mass surveillance
  - jo909 9y ago
    If a government wants to do that, and the hosting company is not able or willing to fight it on a legal basis, it's really not about how easy or hard the actual implementation is. This makes nearly zero difference in the grand scheme of such a surveillance program.
  - geofft 9y ago
    If you run the kernel, mass surveillance on the processes inside the kernel (whether in a container or not) is extremely easy, whether or not TLS is implemented in the kernel. Honestly sometimes I wish we had a library of these sorts of attacks so that it's easier to believe that they're easy, but there is a vague security advantage in not having easy-to-use, well-tested implementations of these attacks available for free on the internets.
- anentropic 9y ago
  > makes an attack even more obvious and maybe harder to detect eh? more obvious and harder to detect at the same time?
  - jo909 9y ago
    Sorry I mean the possibility for an attack, how and where you would implement that etc. Can't edit my post anymore.

jo909 9y ago

Please don't believe for even a second that your container host can't already extract the cleartext just because the SSL is executed in the container context. A kernel facility like that certainly makes an attack even more obvious and maybe harder to detect. But if this is a concern you can't use external hosting. This applies to VMs too, the hypervisor can see and transparently modify everything going on. There is development going on with special CPU instructions that could prevent the hypervisor from reading VM memory, but that is not state of the art and I would not trust it for a long time. You can't even be really sure that a bare metal server you are renting is not extracting the cleartext via a modified bios/efi, bootloader etc, or modified hardware at the worst.

weddpros 9y ago
"that certainly makes it even more obvious": that's what I meant... easy mass surveillance
- jo909 9y ago
  If a government wants to do that, and the hosting company is not able or willing to fight it on a legal basis, it's really not about how easy or hard the actual implementation is. This makes nearly zero difference in the grand scheme of such a surveillance program.
- geofft 9y ago
  If you run the kernel, mass surveillance on the processes inside the kernel (whether in a container or not) is extremely easy, whether or not TLS is implemented in the kernel. Honestly sometimes I wish we had a library of these sorts of attacks so that it's easier to believe that they're easy, but there is a vague security advantage in not having easy-to-use, well-tested implementations of these attacks available for free on the internets.
anentropic 9y ago
> makes an attack even more obvious and maybe harder to detect eh? more obvious and harder to detect at the same time?
- jo909 9y ago
  Sorry I mean the possibility for an attack, how and where you would implement that etc. Can't edit my post anymore.