this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
154 points (90.5% liked)
linuxmemes
21280 readers
1096 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudo
in Windows.
- No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
LUKS doesn't protect you from an evil maid attack. It hides your data when your stuff gets stolen in a powered off state, but it provides neither verification of data, nor does it provide verified/secure/safe boot.
In simple terms: the very first thing which gets loaded needs to be unencrypted (barring some exceptions I will omit here), which can get replaced with an evil version by the evil maid.
Is it even possible to mitigate such an issue? Will resetting the bios by removing the cmos battery not also disable password protection in the bios thus making it possible to disable secure boot?
And at that point could they not just use a hardware keylogger or something?
Yes, with a TPM. A TPM (2.0) can seal secrets and only release it when a machine fulfills certain configuration and state requirements (saved into registers called PCRs).
For example: make the decryption key one part dependant on a passphrase you memorized (to not only rely on a TPM), and one part on something saved in a TPM. If you select the correct PCRs when saving the latter, and your TPM works as advertised (and doesn't offer an easy way to eavesdrop/fool it), removing the battery would make the TPM not release the secret (if removing the battery even still works on modern machines).
However, this depends on having a unified kernel image, having configured dm-verity and maybe more stuff I don't recall right now. Probably should also make sure you don't allow Microsoft's Secure Boot keys and instead only your own. I hope this will get easier in the future, but I know SystemD is actively developing useful tools for that (e.g. ukify).
That all doesn't mean the critique of TPMs (intransparent, proprietary) is invalid. Maybe we'll have OpenTitan based TPMs at some point?
can't it be done with a security key, like yubikey or similar?
I think Heads (osresearch.net) uses security keys as a kind of substitute TPM, however that only works if you replace your - supported - PCs firmware with it.
I don't know too much about how this works in particular, so I can't really compare it. safeboot.dev recommends Heads where possible, which I understand is partly due to safeboot relying on proprietary firmware implementations, while Heads uses libre software for the most part. Sadly the Heads firmware only supports older models/CPUs, which afaik don't receive (all) microcode updates, including one which weakens the IOMMU.
See safeboot.dev for a project which tries to fix this.
You can also check out the sbctl package.
Well, yeah, luks + sb with custom keys + auto-lock when a usb gets ejected or smth is preferable