Posts by vorlon@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AXHOQJKPWjrPvcGYOe by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T18:37:51Z
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A lot of people seem to be upset about the kolektiva.social database compromise because the data was unencrypted on a disk. I think this displays a failure to understand how little *effective* encryption of data happens on servers.The admin should have been using encryption on their local drives. They also shouldn't have had the data local where it could be caught up by an unrelated warrant.But if the warrant had been for kolektiva.social itself, served against a cloud provider?
(DIR) Post #AXHOQK4qk50WFdzdmS by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T18:41:23Z
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Servers are meant to provide services. The bane of an admin's existence is a service outage that they have to be online to resolve. So do you think service admins design their services so that they have to be at a console at boot time before the data can be accessed and the service brought online? Do *you* design your services this way?Ok so you have your data on an encrypted volume in the cloud. Good first start. Where are the encryption keys used to decrypt it when the instance boots?
(DIR) Post #AXHOQKjyHBtuJBETsO by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T18:45:55Z
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Are the decryption keys on the unencrypted part of the instance's root disk? Ok, so both the root disk and the encrypted volume are made available under the same warrant served to the same entity. You don't even have to be told about it (and the hosting provider may be forbidden to tell you).Are you fancy and you know about trusted boot and virtual TPMs, and the encrypted volume is encrypted with keys only released to the VM if it sends the right measurements at boot?
(DIR) Post #AXHOQLfkoM7bCOGcwS by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T18:46:18Z
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Oh, the vTPM is provided to you by the cloud provider? Same answer.
(DIR) Post #AXHOQMJ6S3b5AQg3H6 by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T18:53:51Z
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The solution for all of this is remote attestation. Your admin doesn't have to be at console at boot time, but your instance when booting DOES have to prove to a remote service, which you control, that it hasn't been tampered with; only then does it get access to those decryption keys which are not stored anywhere at rest in the cloud (or at minimum, not in a cloud owned by the same vendor as your data!)Haven't heard of remote attestation? Heard about it but don't know where to start? Yep!
(DIR) Post #AXHOQNAzDihNrXt5GK by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T18:59:53Z
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If there is an off-the-shelf solution for remote attestation accessible to anyone without a full-time professional IT security team, I haven't heard about it.And the cloud providers want there to be. They WANT to be able to assure customers that their data is safe, even from state actors, so that they get the business.In the meantime, if your data is hosted in the cloud, remember the trade-off you're making.
(DIR) Post #AXHOQO5hoq4KhSQNfc by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-01T19:32:20Z
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Anyway, long story short:- Assume that anything you put out in public on the Internet can be traced back to you by the government, provided they have sufficient interest; and- assume that if you put it on the Internet it's public, unless using end-to-end encryption (eee, e2ee).
(DIR) Post #AXJ8J1pey6L8giJ9tY by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-02T19:28:00Z
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I'm starting to flirt with the idea of setting up my own mastodon or #calckey instance. General rhetoric around server administration is off-putting; huge server requirements, moderation time sink, etc.https://n00q.net/articles/guide-mastodon-hometown/ is the first guide I've seen that puts a price tag on it. 50GiB database + 250GiB object store is a pretty manageable cost.That guide is also way too manual for me.1/x
(DIR) Post #AXJ8J3gA6NvmPpsbMu by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-02T19:30:21Z
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Too much twiddling of config files directly. I've been doing Linux distribution packages for 25 years, if I'm going to do this I'm going to do it in a way that other admins can benefit from my effort.So what's the state of the art out there for automation of Fediverse services? Are there snaps/debs/flatpaks for any of the servers? Recipes for orchestrating the various services with ansible/puppet/chef/juju?2/2
(DIR) Post #AXK72OggplqtqyZtoW by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-07-03T16:52:48Z
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@mjg59 yes, obviously your students would've been running Windows Zoomer Edition, not Windows Millennial Edition
(DIR) Post #AZNlxT0giWBv3FgTAW by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-09-03T04:28:27Z
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@Mer__edith https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip we've been having this same conversation with politicians over and over again for literally 30 years. This won't be the last time.
(DIR) Post #AZoRhdtbASNpiTH7iq by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-09-16T03:50:03Z
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@mjg59 sorry you're going through this. Not knowing is definitely the worst.Also sorry other people beat me to the lupus joke.
(DIR) Post #AZobNkEGuS4f6p5zQu by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-09-16T05:39:10Z
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@mjg59 roid rage is as good a justification as any for your campaign of IRC harassment
(DIR) Post #Aafait83OM3PovtAAK by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-10-11T19:09:17Z
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@mjg59 I hear the "Fuck Eben Moglen" mark is currently available
(DIR) Post #AaiEfDSA6gGjae2xrE by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-10-13T01:47:54Z
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@mjg59 a worthy accomplishment!
(DIR) Post #Aatv9NCntBrpRbZn8q by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-10-18T17:05:05Z
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@mjg59 hahahaha mine still does
(DIR) Post #Ab0m1p5WnbvC7hDYEi by vorlon@mastodon.social
2023-10-22T00:26:56Z
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@mjg59 you appear to be assuming a rather high bar for non profits that is not in evidence
(DIR) Post #AdcgmNL12BJhHNLwkC by vorlon@mastodon.social
2024-01-08T03:11:13Z
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@simon actually it's called GNU/AI
(DIR) Post #AhHhLLQB8n7MsdabzM by vorlon@mastodon.social
2024-04-26T14:58:18Z
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For Ubuntu 24.10, we should patch bash so that when it's given content on stdin, it checks the process tree and if the sending process is curl, launches x-www-browser with a page on basic Internet safety instead of executing the command.
(DIR) Post #Ai5c6PnlVW61kNKEEK by vorlon@mastodon.social
2024-04-29T15:58:02Z
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@noodles a good starting point will be fwts, the firmware test suite. I don't know if it has anything for TPM currently.