Comment by kfreds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kfreds | Hacker News Reader

Exciting!

It sounds like you want to achieve system transparency, but I don't see any clear mention of reproducible builds or transparency logs anywhere.

I have followed systemd's efforts into Secure Boot and TPM use with great interest. It has become increasingly clear that you are heading in a very similar direction to these projects:

- Hal Finney's transparent server

- Keylime

- System Transparency

- Project Oak

- Apple Private Cloud Compute

- Moxie's Confer.to

I still remember Jason introducing me to Lennart at FOSDEM in 2020, and we had a short conversation about System Transparency.

I'd love to meet up at FOSDEM. Email me at fredrik@mullvad.net.

Edit: Here we are six years later, and I'm pretty sure we'll eventually replace a lot of things we built with things that the systemd community has now built. On a related note, I think you should consider using Sigsum as your transparency log. :)

Edit2: For anyone interested, here's a recent lightning talk I did that explains the concept that all project above are striving towards, and likely Amutable as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0gxBWwwQE

Hi, I'm David, founding product lead.

Our entire team will be at FOSDEM, and we'd be thrilled to meet more of the Mullvad team. Protecting systems like yours is core to us. We want to understand how we put the right roots of trust and observability into your hands.

Edit: I've reached out privately by email for next steps, as you requested.

Hi David. Great! I actually wasn't planning on going due to other things, but this is worth re-arranging my schedule a bit. See you later this week. Please email me your contact details.

As I mentioned above, we've followed systemd's development in recent years with great interest, as well as that of some other projects. When I started(*) the System Transparency project it was very much a research project.

Today, almost seven years later, I think there's a great opportunity for us to reduce our maintenance burden by re-architecting on top of systemd, and some other things. That way we can focus on other things. There's still a lot of work to do on standardizing transparency building blocks, the witness ecosystem(**), and building an authentication mechanism for system transparency that weaves it all together.

I'm more than happy to share my notes with you. Best case you build exactly what we want. Then we don't have to do it. :)

*: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/system-transparency-future

**: https://witness-network.org

I'm super far from an expert on this, but it NEEDS reproducible builds, right? You need to start from a known good, trusted state - otherwise you cannot trust any new system states. You also need it for updates.

Well, it comes down to what trust assumptions you're OK with. Reproducible reduces trust in the build environment, but you still need to ensure authenticity of the source somehow. Verified boot, measured boot, repro builds, local/remote attestation, and transparency logging provide different things. Combined they form the possibility of a sort of authentication mechanism between a server and client. However, all of the concepts are useful by themselves.

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