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Comment by poettering | Hacker News Reader

Well, I am pretty sure IoT devices should be designed with security in mind, and that means that they need to be protected against offline modification. And that's something OSTree can't really deliver, but dm-crypt can. And casync works pretty well for delivering dm-crypt enabled disk images.

I think OSTree is great — but for embedded devices that are installed in the wild, humm, uh, I don't think so? I am pretty sure there are better options than that.

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I'm with the open source project Mender.io (OTA for embedded Linux) and we think Casync is a very interesting building block and may look into this and evaluate whether it makes sense to incorporate it into our project.

We had looked into OSTree before but given the use case of embedded devices in the wild, we concluded it was too risky as OSTree relies on the filesystem to protect from power failures. And rollback was not built-in and is quite challenging to implement reliably.

Please elaborate on 'need to be protected against offline modification'?

He probably means modification by those who have physical access, which means often the users, but sometimes they are not the owners.

If you have devices like cable box or water meter, the real owners do not want you to modify the device. That's where mechanisms like dm-verity step in.

Think of cell towers or wind power turbines: they both are primary hacking targets in today's world, and they are placed in the wild, in uncontrolled and unprotected locations. This means more or less anybody can just walk by, temporarily cut the power source, take the harddisk out, plug it into their hacking laptop, install an OS trojan on it, place it back into the original device and restore the power. From the PoV of the cell company or the power company this was just a short power cut, and nothing changed. I reality the system was just hacked. And in order to protect yourself against that OSTree can't help you, because disk accesses aren't validated. The only validation takes place during downloading. dm-verity OTOH will protect every single access, and if deployed properly then such "offline" modifications to the OS will result in the device not booting anymore, which is much preferable over accepting that the device was hacked with no scheme to detect it.

And it's not just cell towers or wind power turbines: pretty much any device which is around people not unconditionally trusted needs to be protected against such offline modifications. In fact, if people today build cars, TVs, surveillance cameras or anything else like that and do not deploy dm-verity in some form to make sure the devices cannot be modified offline without noticing are just participating in turning IoT into Internet of Shit.

But physical access == game over? Whatever software layer you add imho.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply dunk the whole device in some epoxy preventing access to the hardware with some anti-tamper deadman switch?

trusted boot and TPMs with remote attestation exist precisely to ensure that physical access does not mean game over. It's all there, people just need to make use of it in their systems. And yes, trusted boot and TPM has issues, but without all this the attack surface is massive, and I think needlessly so.

(trusted boot and TPM are afaik already compromised albeit you need to bring a near rocket scientist)

I will always think physical access is game over whatever 'rocket science' or re-invented old principles people come up with software wise and i'm not sure, but hardware probably too but software is easier to mangle.

And indeed yes, security is layers, layers that make it more difficult, and having many options for layers to choose from that is great.

Also didn't hear about OStree before really, reading up on both for some future project.

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