Practical security for 2014

Practical security for 2014

I believe that computers cannot be made 100% secure, but things can be made more or less secure and that SecureBoot makes forward progress toward more secure. There are fewer attack paths and less trusted code as each step gets the chance to verify the next, it isn't all blindly trusted with no way to verify.

Ah, I see, you think you're reducing the amount of exploitable code. That's not what's happening though. As I explained before, what happens instead is that SecureBoot *elevates* the security sensitiveness of a *large* bunch of code that was never security-sensitive before (parsers and external event handling code in privileged code). To think that the system security will somehow be *increased* by this is utterly misguided. Particularly as we've seen, and continue to see, a large of parsing and event handling code (IPC) added to privileged code to make Linux more dynamic and reactive.

We simply do not know how to reliably write secure system software in C/C++, I think you'd agree. The LWN security page has been a testament to this. Even highly security sensitive software that gets much attention tends to see repeated problems (e.g. the kernel). That previously non-sensitive, non-attacked code is somehow going to be more secure seems highly, highly unlikely. And that user-space system software isn't exactly smaller in scope than the kernel either!

Anyway...