Brief items

The EPID [Enhanced Privacy ID] issue is not too bad for the time being because the Chipset Key is stored inside the platform in the One-Time Programmable (OTP) Memory, and is encrypted. To fully compromise EPID, hackers would need to extract the hardware key used to encrypt the Chipset Key, which resides in Secure Key Storage (SKS). However, this key is not platform-specific. A single key is used for an entire generation of Intel chipsets. And since the ROM vulnerability allows seizing control of code execution before the hardware key generation mechanism in the SKS is locked, and the ROM vulnerability cannot be fixed, we believe that extracting this key is only a matter of time. When this happens, utter chaos will reign. Hardware IDs will be forged, digital content will be extracted, and data from encrypted hard disks will be decrypted.

To me, the history of the Crypto operation helps to explain how U.S. spy agencies became accustomed to, if not addicted to, global surveillance. This program went on for more than 50 years, monitoring the communications of more than 100 countries. I mean, the United States came to expect that kind of penetration, that kind of global surveillance capability. And as Crypto became less able to deliver it, the United States turned to other ways to replace that. And the Snowden documents tell us a lot about how they did that. Instead of working through this company in Switzerland, they turned their sights to companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft and found ways to exploit their global penetration. And so I think it tells us a lot about the mindset and the personalities of spy agencies as well as the global surveillance apparatus that followed the Crypto operation.

All this raises a question, though: just how bad is the CIA’s security that it wasn’t able to keep [Joshua] Schulte out, even accounting for the fact that he is a hacking and computer specialist? And the answer is: absolutely terrible.

The password for the Confluence virtual machine that held all the hacking tools that were stolen and leaked? That’ll be 123ABCdef. And the root login for the main DevLAN server? mysweetsummer.

It actually gets worse than that. Those passwords were shared by the entire team and posted on the group’s intranet. IRC chats published during the trial even revealed team members talking about how terrible their infosec practices were, and joked that CIA internal security would go nuts if they knew. Their justification? The intranet was restricted to members of the Operational Support Branch (OSB): the elite programming unit that makes the CIA’s hacking tools.

Networks are not intrinsically more special than any other I/O peripheral, but they have become gilded unicorns mounted on rotating hovercrafts compared to the I/O devices Unix supported before them.

If we can have technical means to prevent the wreckage, then not using them for handwaving reasons is just violating the only sane engineering principle:

Correctness first

I spent the last 20 years mopping up the violations of this principle.

We have to stop the "features first, performance first" and "good enough" mentality if we want to master the ever increasing complexity of hardware and software in the long run.

From my experience of cleaning up stuff, I can tell you, that correctness first neither hurts performance nor does it prevent features, except those which are wrong to begin with.

PipeWire was originally created to only handle access to video resources and co-exist with PulseAudio. Earlier versions have already been shipping in Fedora for a while, allowing Flatpak applications to access video cameras and to implement screen sharing on Wayland. Eventually, PipeWire has ended up handling any kind of media, to the point of planning to completely replace PulseAudio in the future. The new 0.3 version is marked as a preview for audio support.

But why replace PulseAudio? Although PulseAudio already provides a working intermediate layer to access audio devices, PipeWire has to offer more features that PulseAudio was not designed to deliver, starting with a better security model, which allows isolation between applications and secure access from within containers.

Another interesting feature of PipeWire is that it unifies the two audio systems used on the desktop, JACK for low-latency professional audio and PulseAudio for normal desktop use-cases. PipeWire was designed to be able to accommodate both use cases, delivering very low latency, while at the same time not wasting CPU resources. This design also makes PipeWire a much more efficient solution than PulseAudio in general, making it a perfect fit for embedded use cases too.

A small new service systemd-homed.service has been added, that may be used to securely manage home directories with built-in encryption. The complete user record data is unified with the home directory, thus making home directories naturally migratable.

Someone tried using rr to debug gdb and reported an rr issue because it didn't work. With some effort I was able to fix a couple of bugs and get it working for simple cases. Using improved debuggers to improve debuggers feels good!