← Back to context

Comment by fsflover

7 months ago

I really appreciate your detailed, good-faith responses.

> Attempting to compare line counts of 'security-related code' in isolation, if such a thing can even be framed that way, as if that's a useful metric indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

I didn't invent this. Isn't this exactly how Qubes developers frame it? Are you saying their approach is wrong? https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/faq.html#wha... and https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/developer/system/security...

> Framing closed blobs as fatal flaws while advocating for other situations also containing different closed blobs is disingenuous

Isn't this an important milestone, when the OS has no proprietary bits at all? This not the end, but something worth celebrating, I guess. Apart from that, doesn't Librem 5 has a lower number of blobs in general? I might be wrong of course.

> hand-waving IME (or PSP to whatever degree) as being "disabled,"

It seems you misunderstand me or didn't really read my previous posts carefully. I never considered "disabled" ME sufficiently secure. I strongly prefer "disabled and neutralized" instead, which I btw have on my laptop. It doesn't completely kill it, but it certainly makes it quite unlikely to make any harm.

> yet ignoring it when it doesn't isn't

I guess if I ignored something, I did not notice that it was relevant. Therefore I have no idea what you are talking about, i.e., which exact posts of mine you mean. If you actually want to be helpful, this is not how it's done.

> but "the last relevant VM escape" overly relies on "relevant,"

I admit that, and I specifically mentioned my threat model with passwords in relation to this. You didn't show how my threat model was wrong or not secured against.

Your other points are well articulated, although the corresponding threat model you mentioned is definitely not for everyone. Thanks again.

Noting that they have deliberately added as little code as possible to dom0 to minimize the risk of introducing bugs or attack surface and quantifying it in service of their point is a sensible way of effectively conveying how they're approaching the problem. You attempted to use the same thing as a tool by which to make comparative value judgement, like seeing someone using a hammer to drive a nail and then attempting to use a hammer to drive a screw.

You also continue to shift the goalposts on things which I trust is not from malice but a hazy grasp of some basic fundamental concepts. You've already had it explained to you by people much more qualified than I how the Librem 5 has some entirely closed-source components running woefully outdated firmware, but now it's about celebrating something else entirely.

"Disabled and neutralized" IME is still IME that's highly privileged hardware running a closed-source operating system outside of your ability to monitor it. By the standards of evaluation you set in other comments baselessly criticizing Pixel hardware, you should object all the more to the x86 architecture, even with your ultimately insufficient attempts to reduce harm. The hand-wringing over the possibility that Google has embedded a still-undiscovered way to exfiltrate data from their phones even when running GrapheneOS, is misguided and unfair at best, and if nothing else you should be consistent in your application of these principles.

I trust I shouldn't need to cite every point you repetitiously make in order for you to stop complaining that I'm not limiting the scope of my reply perfectly to one particular comment of yours, as if this is some kind of contest of form.

If you kept current or really spent any time at all researching XSAs you'd know that its shared memory architecture alone has resulted in numerous XSAs, some of which could very much apply to your threat model. Hardware MTE would go a long way to mitigating that, which Pixels have. In the hypothetical scenario of Qubes OS running on more secure hardware than even your home brew situation, that would be a significant improvement over the status quo which you say you can't even imagine. You're defining your threat model overly narrowly by excluding all kinds of relevant factors and then declaring it wholly met. That's not how this stuff works.

If, after all this, you still can't imagine how Qubes could be improved upon for your particular threat model (having passwords in a vault appVM exfiltrated) after hearing just a couple hypothetical benefits of running it on more secure hardware, it's unsurprising you can't recognize the comparative advantages of GrapheneOS and instead want to rely on things like counting lines of security code because you once saw someone else do it in a different context.

My goal here is not to change your mind, that part is up to you and you've already had one of the finest minds in the field address your issues point by point elsewhere (that was a fun surprise to see). My goal is to reduce the ease with which you can continue to filibuster people into moving on with their lives so you can then continue making the same unjustifiable claim that nobody ever offers a meaningful explanation to you when you merely ask simple questions about the benefits of the project. Unstoppable Force Meets Argumentum ad nauseam.

  • > Noting that they have deliberately added as little code as possible to dom0 to minimize the risk of introducing bugs or attack surface and quantifying it in service of their point is a sensible way of effectively conveying how they're approaching the problem. You attempted to use the same thing as a tool by which to make comparative value judgement

    I guess you only opened my first link but not the second. Here is a quote from the second link for you:

    > The size of the current TCB is on the order of hundreds of thousands of lines of C code, which is several orders of magnitude less than other OSes. (In Windows, Linux, and Mac OSes, the amount of trusted code is typically on the order of tens of millions of lines of C code.)

  • > running woefully outdated firmware

    This is just false. Looks like you mix false accusations with reasonable arguments.

    I still didn't receive any reply concerning the lines of code for the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) of GrapheneOS.