3 ms·

SecureBoot in Ubuntu 12.10

45 points by riledhel 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
avar 14y ago
I've seen a lot written about the how of SecureBoot but is there a good summary of the why's. I'm still deeply skeptical that this is part of Microsoft's plan to eventually transform the PC architecture into something console-like. They've already de-facto achieved that by not mandating that custom OS's can be booted on Windows 8 supporting ARM devices, and between them and pressure from content owners wanting complicit OS's that don't run applications that do things they don't like I can only see that sort of thing progressing in the future.
- megaman821 14y ago
  I agree that I would like to see custom OS's be bootable on any device, but Microsoft is merely continuing the trend here. Neither Apple nor most Android manufacturers allow ARM devices to boot custom OS's. What is so special about Microsoft that it is an issue when they do it but not the 2+ years other manufacturers have been doing it?
  - prosody 14y ago
    I think the general objection is that the instruction set of the CPU isn't salient, rather it's the form factor. The Surface is presented more like a laptop than a tablet, and there are some 3rd party manufacturer Windows 8 ARM laptops in the pipeline.
- wmf 14y ago
  Ostensibly secure boot exists to foil bootkits (bootloader rootkits) which (in theory) cannot be detected or removed by any antivirus tools. Secure boot also prevents bootloader-based activation hacks (e.g. "Windows Loader") that make it easy to pirate Windows (these hacks can be seen as a special case of "benign" bootkits).
  - dmboyd 14y ago
    How prevalent are bootkit (MBR) malicious exploits though? Surely the right place for this is for windows to prevent boot modification without authentication though UAC or something similar?
    - wmf 14y ago
      Secure boot is a form of defense in depth that is really only needed if the kernel is compromised. So yes, the attacks that it prevents are hypothetical and may never exist. And yes, it may be too high a price to pay for the unknown level of protection that it provides.
      - gizmo686 14y ago
        A compromised kernel does not seem that unlikely. I am not fammilar with Windows, but I assume it supports hotloading code into kernel space (like modules in linux), given this, it would be trivial to get from root in userspace to arbitrary code execution in kernel space.
        wmf 14y ago
        Between driver signing and kernel patch protection, it's harder than you think. But clearly Microsoft is preparing for that sort of compromise.
        gizmo686 14y ago
        If some signed driver is found to have an exploit, is there a mechanism to revoke the signature?
    - ladzoppelin 14y ago
      It already exists. http://www.stoned-vienna.com/ http://www.stoned-vienna.com/ I also read that it was trivial to make a "boot kit" for Windows 8 without secure boot. I actually think it a very big deal and hope many Linux distro's develop something similar.
sedev 14y ago
The whole mess around this should be a reminder to us all that it's very, very hard to disentangle social problems from technical problems.
- thwarted 14y ago
  It's easy to disentangle them, they are not inheritenly related. What's hard is convincing some people that social problems don't have technical solutions. The attractiveness of the technical solution is that it is so much easier than the social solution that it just has to exist.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Like the password problem (eg people choosing "password123" as their password). That's an easy technical problem to solve (and in fact is solved). I can't understand why passwords are so easy to crack. It's only a matter of getting everyone to behave differently. <mild sarcasm/> I would argue that all of the really hard problems in software development[1] (and most technologies) are really hard because they are social in nature, and it is the social nature that makes them so hard. This is similar to the food production/distribution problem. We create enough food to feed the world, but, due to many geopolitical forces, we can't get the food to all the people that need it. No matter how good we get at growing and shipping food (the technical solution), there is some warlord somewhere who will steal it from his subjects (the social problem). 1. Not computer science. P==NP has nothing to do with Aunt Marge.
    - sedev 14y ago
      That's a great example, thanks for bringing that in. I was more thinking of community management since I'd just been skimming "Building Web Reputation Systems" again and its authors have quite a bit to say about the entanglement of social and technical problems. But like you say, there are a lot of domains where technical problems are entangled with social ones - it's just that those domains are software engineering as a practical discipline, not computer science as a branch of math. My favorite examples are time zones, Unicode, and country names/boundaries. How many time zones are there in the world? How many will there be next year? Your NTP server needs to know. How will you store humans' names that can't be expressed with the BMP alone? The iCloud servers need to know. Is Taiwan a country? How about Kurdistan? Where are the borders of India? Google Maps needs to know. There is plenty of software that won't have to deal with these problems ... but these problems can be huge headaches, and part of that is because of their nature as both social and technical problems.

45 points by riledhel 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

avar 14y ago

I've seen a lot written about the how of SecureBoot but is there a good summary of the why's. I'm still deeply skeptical that this is part of Microsoft's plan to eventually transform the PC architecture into something console-like. They've already de-facto achieved that by not mandating that custom OS's can be booted on Windows 8 supporting ARM devices, and between them and pressure from content owners wanting complicit OS's that don't run applications that do things they don't like I can only see that sort of thing progressing in the future.

megaman821 14y ago
I agree that I would like to see custom OS's be bootable on any device, but Microsoft is merely continuing the trend here. Neither Apple nor most Android manufacturers allow ARM devices to boot custom OS's. What is so special about Microsoft that it is an issue when they do it but not the 2+ years other manufacturers have been doing it?
- prosody 14y ago
  I think the general objection is that the instruction set of the CPU isn't salient, rather it's the form factor. The Surface is presented more like a laptop than a tablet, and there are some 3rd party manufacturer Windows 8 ARM laptops in the pipeline.
wmf 14y ago
Ostensibly secure boot exists to foil bootkits (bootloader rootkits) which (in theory) cannot be detected or removed by any antivirus tools. Secure boot also prevents bootloader-based activation hacks (e.g. "Windows Loader") that make it easy to pirate Windows (these hacks can be seen as a special case of "benign" bootkits).
- dmboyd 14y ago
  How prevalent are bootkit (MBR) malicious exploits though? Surely the right place for this is for windows to prevent boot modification without authentication though UAC or something similar?
  - wmf 14y ago
    Secure boot is a form of defense in depth that is really only needed if the kernel is compromised. So yes, the attacks that it prevents are hypothetical and may never exist. And yes, it may be too high a price to pay for the unknown level of protection that it provides.
    - gizmo686 14y ago
      A compromised kernel does not seem that unlikely. I am not fammilar with Windows, but I assume it supports hotloading code into kernel space (like modules in linux), given this, it would be trivial to get from root in userspace to arbitrary code execution in kernel space.
      - wmf 14y ago
        Between driver signing and kernel patch protection, it's harder than you think. But clearly Microsoft is preparing for that sort of compromise.
        gizmo686 14y ago
        If some signed driver is found to have an exploit, is there a mechanism to revoke the signature?
  - ladzoppelin 14y ago
    It already exists. http://www.stoned-vienna.com/ http://www.stoned-vienna.com/ I also read that it was trivial to make a "boot kit" for Windows 8 without secure boot. I actually think it a very big deal and hope many Linux distro's develop something similar.

sedev 14y ago

The whole mess around this should be a reminder to us all that it's very, very hard to disentangle social problems from technical problems.

thwarted 14y ago
It's easy to disentangle them, they are not inheritenly related. What's hard is convincing some people that social problems don't have technical solutions. The attractiveness of the technical solution is that it is so much easier than the social solution that it just has to exist.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Like the password problem (eg people choosing "password123" as their password). That's an easy technical problem to solve (and in fact is solved). I can't understand why passwords are so easy to crack. It's only a matter of getting everyone to behave differently. <mild sarcasm/> I would argue that all of the really hard problems in software development[1] (and most technologies) are really hard because they are social in nature, and it is the social nature that makes them so hard. This is similar to the food production/distribution problem. We create enough food to feed the world, but, due to many geopolitical forces, we can't get the food to all the people that need it. No matter how good we get at growing and shipping food (the technical solution), there is some warlord somewhere who will steal it from his subjects (the social problem). 1. Not computer science. P==NP has nothing to do with Aunt Marge.
  - sedev 14y ago
    That's a great example, thanks for bringing that in. I was more thinking of community management since I'd just been skimming "Building Web Reputation Systems" again and its authors have quite a bit to say about the entanglement of social and technical problems. But like you say, there are a lot of domains where technical problems are entangled with social ones - it's just that those domains are software engineering as a practical discipline, not computer science as a branch of math. My favorite examples are time zones, Unicode, and country names/boundaries. How many time zones are there in the world? How many will there be next year? Your NTP server needs to know. How will you store humans' names that can't be expressed with the BMP alone? The iCloud servers need to know. Is Taiwan a country? How about Kurdistan? Where are the borders of India? Google Maps needs to know. There is plenty of software that won't have to deal with these problems ... but these problems can be huge headaches, and part of that is because of their nature as both social and technical problems.