Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Apr 7, 2013 22:44 UTC (Sun) by viro (subscriber, #7872)
In reply to: Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot by kleptog
Parent article: Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Bullshit. Suppose the kernel hole in question is in e.g. parsing on-disk metadata. You are going to mount root fs, right? And all the "let's make sure /etc/rc.d/ isn't modified" crap in the world is not going to do anything about that, since no visible files need to be modified.

And before you go into "oh, but that reduces attack surface" - not really. Consider a combination of (1) hole in some piece of shit desktop software that goes through luser's homedir and cross-references his pr0n stash^W^Wphoto collection with (2) kernel exploit of any kind used by the code hidden in said collection and executed by (1). Sure, it'll wait until the luser logs in. BFD.

Once a box had been had, it's been had, period.

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Apr 8, 2013 18:09 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (4 responses)

Sure, it'll wait until the luser logs in. BFD.

Actually, I find this a BFD. It means the virus scanner started at boot has a chance to download new signatures and scan for the malware before it has a chance to run. That's a significant improvement over the current situation.

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Apr 8, 2013 20:26 UTC (Mon) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (3 responses)

In which respect? That Scamantec and their ilk get money from more suckers? I had a front-seat view of some of their games and I'd trust a politician sooner than those shits. If you rely on their products, you deserve everything you get - stupidity must be punished, after all...

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Apr 8, 2013 22:37 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

So when is Linux going to be completely exploit-free with rigidly defined security sandboxes isolating applications' data?

What? You say "never"?

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Apr 9, 2013 11:32 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (1 responses)

I seriously doubt this goal is even possible.

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Apr 9, 2013 15:27 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

And that's why antiviruses are a practical compromise. Yes, they are an ugly kludge but reality is also quite ugly.

If Linux were as popular as Windows then it would have needed antivirus-like applications as well.

And yes, Android actually already has an antivirus app that runs on Google's servers.