I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life, I wouldn't put my name to something that would enable the kinds of issues you describe.
Until you get acquired, receive a golden parachute and use it when realizing that the new direction does not align with your views anymore.
But, granted, if all you do is FOSS then you will anyway have a hard time keeping evil actors from using your tech for evil things. Might as well get some money out of it, if they actually dump money on you.
Better security is good in theory, as long as the user maintains control and the security is on the user end. The last thing we need is required ID linked attestation for accessing websites or something similar.
it will be railroaded through in the same way that systemD was railroaded onto us.
It would be a lot more reassuring if we knew what the business model actually was, or indeed anything else at all about this. I remain somewhat confused as to the purpose of this announcement when no actual information seems to be forthcoming. The negative reactions seen here were quite predictable, given the sensitive topic and the little information we do have.
Suppose you wanted to identify potential agitators by scanning all communication for indications in a fascist state one could require this technology in all trusted environments and require such an environment to bank, connect to an ISP, or use Netflix.
One could even imagine a completely benign usage which only identified actual wrong doing alongside another which profiled based almost entirely on anti regime sentiment or reasonable discontent.
The good users would argue that the only problem with the technology is its misuse but without the underlying technology such misuse is impossible.
One can imagine two entirely different parallel universes one in which a few great powers went the wrong way in part enabled by trusted computing and the pervasive surveillance enabled by the capability of AI to do the massive and boring task of analyzing a massive glut of ordinary behaviour and communication + tech and law to ensure said surveillance is carried out.
Even those not misusing the tech may find themselves worse off in such a world.
Why again should we trust this technology just because you are a good person?
- your bank won't let you log in from an "insecure" device.
- you won't be able to play videos on an "insecure" device.
- you won't be able to play video games on an "insecure" device.
And so on, and so forth.
The attestation portion of those systems is happening on locked down devices, and if you gain ownership of the devices they no longer attest themselves.
This is the curse of the duopoly of iOS and Android.
BankID in Sweden will only run with one of these devices, they used to offer a card system but getting one seems to be impossible these days. So you're really stuck with a mobile device as your primary means of identification for banking and such.
There's a reason that general purpose computers are locked to 720p on Netflix and Disney+; yet AppleTV's are not.
the anti-user attestation will at least be full of security holes, and likely won't work at all
It took us nearly a decade and a half to unfuck the pulseaudio situation and finally arrive at a simple solution (pipewire).
SystemD has a lot more people refining it down but a clean (under the hood) implementation probably won't be witnessed in my lifetime.
for systemd, I don't think I have a single linux system that boots/reboots reliably 100% of the time these days
The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way.
SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work that makes systemd function smooth.
I was today years old when I realised this is true for both bits of poetter-ware. Weird.
pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset
with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it
systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet
the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly
this isn't some hacked up .service file I made, it's that from an extremely popular package from a very popular distro
(yeah I know, use a socket activated service......... more tight coupling to the garbage software)
the day before that I had a service fail to start because the wall clock was shifted by systemd-timesyncd during startup, and then the startup timeout fired because the clock advanced more than the timeout
then the week before that I had a load of stuff start before the time was synced, because chrony has some weird interactions with time-sync.target
it's literally a new random problem every other boot because of this non-deterministic startup, which was never a problem with traditional init or /etc/rc
for what? to save maybe a second of boot time
if the distro maintainers don't understand the systemd dependency model after a decade then it's unfit for purpose
well, systemd's got them beat there!
This gave me a good chuckle. Systemd literally was created to solve the awful race conditions and non-determinism in other init systems. And it has done a tremendous job at it. Hence the litany of options to ensure correct order and execution: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
And outside of esoteric setups I haven't ever encountered the problems you mentioned with service files.
runit's approach is to just keep trying to start the shell script every 2 seconds until it works. One of those worse–is–better ideas. You can check for arbitrary conditions and error–exit, and it will keep trying. If you need the time synced you can just make your script fail if the time is not synced.
like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced"
and it's not esoteric, even ListenAddress with sshd doesn't even work reliably
the ONLY piece of systemd I've not had problems with is systemd-boot, and then it turned out they didn't write that
"network-online.target is a target that actively waits until the network is “up”, where the definition of “up” is defined by the network management software. Usually it indicates a configured, routable IP address of some kind. Its primary purpose is to actively delay activation of services until the network has been set up."
For time sync checks, I assume one of the targets available will effectively mean a time sync has happened. Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.
this service (untouched by me) had:
After=local-fs.target network-online.target remote-fs.target time-sync.target
but it was still started without an IP address, and then failed to bind
just like this sort of problem: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880#issuecomment-...
the entire thing is unreliable and doesn't act like you'd expect
> Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.
at that point I might as well go back to init=/etc/rc
It is possible for a specification to be so abstract that it's useless.
* smartphone device integrity checks (SafetyNet / Play Integrity / Apple DeviceCheck)
* HDMI/HDCP
* streaming DRM (Widevine / FairPlay)
* Secure Boot (vendor-keyed deployments)
* printers w/ signed/chipped cartridges (consumables auth)
* proprietary file formats + network effects (office docs, messaging)
However, I agree that the risks to individuals and their freedoms stemming from these technologies outweigh the benefits in most cases.
For another example, IntegriCloud: https://secure.integricloud.com/
I personally don't think this product matters all that much for now. These types of tech is not oppressive by itself, only when it is being demanded by an adversary. The ability of the adversary to demand it is a function of how widespread the capability is, and there aren't going to be enough Linux clients for this to start infringing on the rights of the general public just yet.
A bigger concern is all the efforts aimed at imposing integrity checks on platforms like the Web. That will eventually force users to make a choice between being denied essential services and accepting these demands.
I also think AI would substantially curtail the effect of many of these anti-user efforts. For example a bot can be programmed to automate using a secure phone and controlled from a user-controlled device, cheat in games, etc.
Great example of proving something to your own organization. Mullvad is probably the most trusted VPN provider and they do this! But this is not a power that should be exposed to regular applications, or we end up with a dystopian future of you are not allowed to use your own computer.
I wish this myth would die at this point.
Secure Boot allows you to enroll your own keys. This is part of the spec, and there are no shipped firmwares that prevents you from going through this process.
The banking apps still won't trust them, though.
To add a quote from Lennart himself:
"The OS configuration and state (i.e. /etc/ and /var/) must be encrypted, and authenticated before they are used. The encryption key should be bound to the TPM device; i.e system data should be locked to a security concept belonging to the system, not the user."
Your system will not belong to you anymore. Just as it is with Android.
UEFI secure boot on PCs, yes for the most part. A lot of mobile platforms just never supported this. It's not a myth.
Note that the comment you replied to does not even mention phones. Locked down Secure Boot on UEFI is not uncommon on mobile platforms, such as x86-64 tablets.
Microsoft required that users be able to enroll their own keys on x86. On ARM, they used to mandate that users could not enroll their own keys. That they later changed this does not erase the past. Also, I've anecdotally heard claims of buggy implementations that do in fact prevent users from changing secure boot settings.
What, this part is only needed for secure boot? I'm not sec... oh. So go back to the UEFI settings, turn secure boot off, problem solved. I usually also turn off SELinux right after install.
So I'm an old greybeard who likes to have full control. Less secure. But at least I get the choice. Hopefully I continue to do so. The notion of not being able to access online banking services or other things that require account login, without running on a "fully attested" system does worry me.
Currently SB is effectively useless because it will at best authenticate your kernel but the initrd and subsequent userspace (including programs that run as root) are unverified and can be replaced by malicious alternatives.
Secure Boot as it stands right now in the Linux world is effectively an annoyance that’s only there as a shortcut to get distros to boot on systems that trust Microsoft’s keys but otherwise offer no actual security.
It however doesn’t have to be this way, and I welcome efforts to make Linux just as secure as proprietary OSes who actually have full code signature verification all the way down to userspace.
I think you might want to go re-read the last ~6 months of IT news in regards of "secure proprietary OSes".
add luks root, then it's not that bad
Most of the firmwares I've used lately seem to allow adding custom secureboot keys.
Code signature verification is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it could be achieved. Have distro maintainers sign the code?
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
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.
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. :)
The website itself is rather vague in its stated goals and mechanisms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743756
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/intel-and-amd-trust...
You'll be free to run your own Linux, but don't expect it to work outside of niche uses.
this basically will remove or significantly encumber user control over their system, such that any modification will make you loose your "signed" status and ... boom! goodbye accessing the internet without an id
pottering recently works for Microsoft, they want to turn linux into an appliance just like windows, no longer a general purpose os. the transition is still far from over on windows, but look at android and how the google play services dependency/choke-hold is
im sure ill get many down votes, but despite some hyperbole this is the trajectory
Probably obvious from the surnames but this is the first time I've seen a EU company pop up on Hacker News that could be mistaken for a Californian company. Nice to see that ambition.
I understand systemd is controversial, that can be debated endlessly but the executive team and engineering team look very competitive. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/
I am glad to see these efforts are now under an independent firm rather than being directed by Microsoft.
What is the ownership structure like? Where/who have you received funding from, and what is the plan for ongoing monetization of your work?
Would you ever sell the company to Microsoft, Google, or Amazon?
Thanks.
No matter what the founders say, the answer to this question is always yes.
What does this mean? Why would anyone want this? Can you explain this to me like I'm five years old?
See the "features" list from systemd 257/258 [0].
2. Are you looking for pilot customers?
Are these some problems you've personally been dealing with?
Then we discovered snapshot.debian.org wasn't feeling well, so that was another (important) detour.
Part of me wish we had focused more on getting System Transparency in its entirety in production at Mullvad. On the other hand I certainly don't regret us creating Tillitis TKey, Sigsum, taking care of Debian Snapshot service, and several other things.
Now, six years later, systemd and other projects have gotten a long way to building several of the things we need for ST. It doesn't make sense to do double work, so I want to seize the moment and make sure we coordinate.
Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't go the usual path of a minimal support, optional support and then being virtually mandatory by means of tight coupling with other subsystems.
So we try to make every new feature that might be disruptive optional in systemd and opt-in. Of course we don't always succeed and there will always be differences in opinion.
Also, we're a team of people that started in open source and have done open source for most of our careers. We definitely don't intend to change that at all. Keeping systemd a healthy project will certainly always stay important for me.
Thanks for the answer. Let me ask you something close with a more blunt angle:
Considering most of the tech is already present and shipping in the current systemd, what prevents our systems to become a immutable monolith like macOS or current Android with the flick of a switch?
Or a more grave scenario: What prevents Microsoft from mandating removal of enrollment permissions for user keychains and Secure Boot toggle, hence every Linux distribution has to go through Microsoft's blessing to be bootable?
But we will never enforce using any of these features in systemd itself. It will always be up to the distro to enable and configure the system to become an immutable monolith. And I certainly don't think distributions like Fedora or Debian will ever go in that direction.
We don't really have any control over what Microsoft decides to do with Secure Boot. If they decide at one point to make Secure Boot reject any Linux distribution and hardware vendors prevent enrolling user owned keys, we're in just as much trouble as everyone else running Linux will be.
I doubt that will actually happen in practice though.
Then maybe you shouldn't be doing it?
But I'm losing hope with those.
Plus, it's an avoidant and reductionist take.
Note: I have nothing against BSDs, but again, this is not the answer.
Stop trying to make everyone act like you act.
Also, I know. A few of my colleagues run {open, free, dragonfly}BSD as their daily drivers for more than two decades. Also, we have BSD based systems at a couple of places.
However, as a user of almost all mainstream OSes (at the same time, for different reasons), and planning to include OpenBSD to that roster (taking care of a fleet takes time), I'd love to everyone select the correct tool for their applications and don't throw stones at people who doesn't act like them.
Please remember that we all sit in houses made of glass before throwing things to others.
Oh, also please don't make assumptions about people you don't know.
Yeah! Telling people what to do is rude!
> Anyone still using Linux on the desktop in 2026 should switch
Oh.
"Just don't use X" is in fact a very engaged and principled response. Try again.
If you were not a systemd maintainer and have started this project/company independently targeting systemd, you would have to go through the same process as everyone and I would have expected the systemd maintainers to, look at it objectively and review with healthy skepticism before accepting it. But we cannot rely on that basic checks and balances anymore and that's the most worrying part.
> that might be disruptive optional in systemd
> we don't always succeed and there will always be differences in opinion.
You (including other maintainers) are still the final arbitrator of what's disruptive. The differences of opinion in the past have mostly been settled as "deal with it" and that's the basis of current skepticism.
What problem does this solve for Linux or people who use Linux? Why is this different from me simply enabling encryption on the drive?
In my case I am talking about myself. I prefer to actually know what is running on my systems and ensure that they are as I expect them to be and not that they may have been modified unbeknownst to me.
Atomicity means you can track every change, and every change is so small that it affects only one thing and can be traced, replayed or rolled back. Like it's going from A to B and being able to return back to A (or going to B again) in a determinate manner.
As per the announcement, we’ll be building a favorite color over the next months and sharing more information as it rolls out.
Who is this for / what problem does it solve?
I guess security? Or maybe reproducability?
>We are building cryptographically verifiable integrity into Linux systems
I wonder what that means ? It could be a good thing, but I tend to think it could be a privacy nightmare depending on who controls the keys.
(London. On some of my relatives.)
But I'm sure in this case when they achieve some kind of dominant position and Microsoft offers to re-absorb them they will do the honorable thing.
You. The money quote about the current state of Linux security:
> In fact, right now, your data is probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or MacOS devices, than it is on typical Linux distributions.
Say what you want about systemd the project but they're the only ones moving foundational Linux security forward, no one else even has the ambition to try. The hardening tools they've brought to Linux are so far ahead of everything else it's not even funny.
the guys that copy your bitlocker keys in the clear
Somebody will use it and eventually force it if it exists and I don't think gaming especially those requiring anti-cheat is worth that risk.
If that means linux will not be able to overtake window's market share, that's ok. At-least the year of the linux memes will still be funny.
e.g. https://support.faceit.com/hc/en-us/articles/19590307650588-...
As said above, it's about who controls the keys. It's either building your own castle or having to live with the Ultimate TiVo.
We'll see.
I have my reservations, ideas, and what it's supposed to do, but this is not a place to make speculations and to break spirits.
I'll put my criticism out politely when it's time.
Look, I hate systemd just as much as the next guy - but how are you getting "DRM" out of this?
There are also bad forms of remote attestation (like Google's variant that helps them let banks block you if you are running an alt-os). Those suck and should be rejected.
Edit: bri3d described what I mean better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785123
Let's say I accept this statement.
What makes you think trusted boot == remote attestation?
No, it's not. (And for that matter, neither is remote attestation)
You're conflating the technology with the use.
I believe that you have only thought about these technologies as they pertain to DRM, now I'm here to tell you there are other valid use cases.
Or maybe your definition of "DRM" is so broad that it includes me setting up my own trusted boot chain on my own hardware? I don't really think that's a productive definition.
They literally don't.
For a decade, I worked on secure boot & attestation for a device that was both:
- firmware updatable - had zero concept or hardware that connected it to anything that could remotely be called a network
The update is predicated on a valid signature.
IMO it's pretty clear that this is a server play because the only place where Linux has enough of a foothold to make client / end-user attestation financially interesting is Android, where it already exists. And to me the server play actually gives me more capabilities than I had: it lets me run my code on cloud provided machines and/or use cloud services with some level of assurance that the provider hasn't backdoored me and my systems haven't been compromised.
It's like designing new kinds of nerve gas, "quite sure" that it will only ever be in the hands of good guys who aren't going to hurt people with it. That's powerful naïveté. Once you make it, you can't control who has it and what they use it for. There's no take-backsies, that's why it should never be created in the first place.
The "bad" version, client attestation, is already implemented on Android, and could be implemented elsewhere but is only a parallel concept.
There is unmet industrial market demand for the (IMO) "not so bad / maybe even good" version, server attestation.
If there’s a path to profitability, great for them, and for me too; because it means it won’t be available at no charge.
One of the most grating pain points of the early versions of systemd was a general lack of humility, some would say rank arrogance, displayed by the project lead and his orbiters. Today systemd is in a state of "not great, not terrible" but it was (and in some circles still is) notorious for breaking peoples' linux installs, their workflows, and generally just causing a lot of headaches. The systemd project leads responded mostly with Apple-style "you're holding it wrong" sneers.
It's not immediately clear to me what exactly Amutable will be implementing, but it smells a lot like some sort of DRM, and my immediate reaction is that this is something that Big Tech wants but that users don't.
My question is this: Has Lennart's attitude changed, or can linux users expect more of the same paternalism as some new technology is pushed on us whether we like it or not?
It improves on about every level compared to what came before. And no, nothing is perfect and you sometimes have to troubleshoot it.
About ten years ago I took a three day cross-country Amtrak trip where I wanted to work on some data analysis that used mysql for its backend. It was a great venue for that sort of work because the lack of train-internet was wonderful to keep me focused. The data I was working with was about 20GB of parking ticket data. The data took a while to process over SQL which gave me the chance to check out the world unfolding outside of the train.
At some point, mysql (well, mariadb) got into a weird state after an unclean shutdown that put itself into recovery mode where upon startup it had to do some disk-intensive cleanup. Thing is -- systemd has a default setting (that's not readily documented, nor sufficiently described in its logs when the behavior happens) that halts the service startup after 30 seconds to try again. On loop.
My troubleshooting attempts were unsuccessful. And since I deleted the original csv files to save disk space, I wasn't able to even poke at the CSV files through python or whatnot.
So instead of doing the analysis I wanted to do on the train, I had to wait until I got to the end of the line to fix it. Sure enough, it was some default 30s timeout that's not explicitly mentioned nor commented out like many services do.
So, saying that things are "much better in every way" really falls on deaf ears and is reminiscent of the systemd devs' dismissive/arrogant behavior that many folk are frustrated about.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1780979
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/a083b4875e8dec5ce5...
That was far from the only time that the systemd developers decided to just break norms or do weird things because they felt like it, and then poorly communicate that change. Change itself is fine, it's how we progress. But part of that arrogance that you mentioned was always framing people who didn't like capricious or poorly communicated changes as being against progress, and that's always been the most annoying part of the whole thing.
How can I cancel a systemd startup task that blocks the login prompt? / how is forcing me to wait for dhcp on a network interface that isn't even plugged in a better experience?
It’s not really the fault of systemd; it just enables new possibilities that were previously difficult/impossible and now the usage of said possibilities is surfacing problems.
On other inits, I can hit ctrl-C to break out of a poorly configured setup. Yes, it's more difficult when there's potentially parallelism. But systemd is not uniformly better than everything else when it lacks interactivity.
And it might not be better than everything else if common distributions set it up wrong because it's difficult to set it up right. If we're willing to discount problems related to one init system because the distribution is holding it wrong, then why don't we blame problems with other init systems on distributions or applications, too? There's no need to restart crashing applications if applications don't crash, etc.
There are serious problems with the systemd paradigm, most of which I couldn't argue for or against. But at least in Void, I can remove network-manger altogether, use cron as I always have, and generally remain free to do as I please until eventually every package there is has systemd dependencies which seems frightfully plausible at this pace.
Void is as good as I could have wanted. If that ever goes, I guess it's either BSD or a cave somewhere.
I'm glad to see the terse questions here. They're well warranted.
of course you can run Cron as well and run all your jobs twice in two different ways, but that's only pedantically possible as it's a completely useless way to do things.
System shutdown/reboot is now unreliable. Sometimes it will be just as quick as it was before systemd arrived, but other times, systemd will decide that something isn't to its liking, and block shutdown for somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, waiting for something that will never happen. The thing in question might be different from one session to the next, and from one systemd version to the next; I can spend hours or days tracking down the process/mount/service in question and finding a workaround, only to have systemd hang on something else the next day. It offers no manual skip option, so unless I happen to be working on a host with systemd's timeouts reconfigured to reduce this problem, I'm stuck with either forcing a power-off or having my time wasted.
Something about systemd's meddling with cgroups broke the lxc control commands a few years back. To work around the problem, I have to replace every such command I use with something like `systemd-run --quiet --user --scope --property=Delegate=yes <command>`. That's a PITA that I'm unlikely to ever remember (or want to type) so I effectively cannot manage containers interactively without helper scripts any more. It's also a new systemd dependency, so those helper scripts now also need checks for cgroup version and systemd presence, and a different code path depending on the result. Making matters worse, that systemd-run command occasionally fails even when I do everything "right". What was once simple and easy is now complex and unreliable.
At some point, Lennart unilaterally decided that all machines accessed over a network must have a domain name. Subsequently, every machine running a distro that had migrated to systemd-resolved was suddenly unable to resolve its hostname-only peers on the LAN, despite the DNS server handling them just fine. Finding the problem, figuring out the cause, and reconfiguring around it wasn't the end of the world, but it did waste more of my time. Repeating that experience once or twice more when systemd behavior changed again and again eventually drove me to a policy of ripping out systemd-resolved entirely on any new installation. (Which, of course, takes more time.) I think this behavior may have been rolled back by now, but sadly, I'll never get my time back.
There are more examples, but I'm tired of re-living them and don't really want to write a book. I hope these few are enough to convey my point:
Systemd has been a net negative in my experience. It has made my life markedly worse, without bringing anything I needed. Based on conversations, comments, and bug reports I've seen over the years, I get the impression that many others have had a similar experience, but don't bother speaking up about it any more, because they're tired of being dismissed, ignored, or shouted down, just as I am.
I would welcome a reliable, minimal, non-invasive, dependency-based init. Systemd is not it.
Also trying to use systemd with podman is frustrating as hell. You just cannot run a system service using podman as a non-root user and have it work correctly.
My understanding is quadlet does not solve this, and my options are calling "systemctl --user" or "--userns auto". I would love to be wrong here.
Err... You just need to run `podman-compose systemd`?
I have my entire self-hosted stack running with systemd-controlled Podman, in regular user accounts.
So, some of the people doing "typical HN rage-posting about DRM" are also absolutely right.
The capabilities locking down macOS and iOS and related hardware also can be used for good, but they are not used for that.
What do you mean by this?
Is the concern that systemd is suddenly going to require that users enable some kind of attestation functionality? That making attestation possible or easier is going to cause third parties to start requiring it for client machines running Linux? This doesn't even really seem to be a goal; there's not really money to be made there.
As far as I can tell the sales pitch here is literally "we make it so you can assure the machines running in your datacenter are doing what they say they are," which seems pretty nice to me, and the perversions of this to erode user rights are either just as likely as they ever were or incredibly strange edge cases.
So, every PC sold to consumers is sanctioned by Microsoft. This list contains Secure Boot and TPM based requirements, too.
If Microsoft decides to eliminate enrollment of user keys and Secure Boot toggle, they can revoke current signing keys for "shims" and force Linux distributions to go full immutable to "sign" their bootloaders so they can boot. As said above, it's not something Amutable can control, but enable by proxy and by accident.
Look, I work in a datacenter, with a sizeable fleet. Being able to verify that fleet is desirable for some kinds of operations, I understand that. On the other hand, like every double edged sword, this can cut in both ways.
I just want to highlight that, that's all.
Now we have immutable distributions (SuSE, Fedora, NixOS). We have the infrastructure for attestation (systemd's UKI, image based boot, and other immutability features), TPMs and controversially uutils (Which is MIT licensed and has the stated goal to replace all GNU userspace).
You can build an immutable and adversarial userspace where you don't have to share the source, and require every boot and application call to attest. The theoretical thickness of the wall is both much greater and this theoretical state is much easier to achieve.
20 years ago the only barrier was booting. After that everything was free. Now it's possible to boot into a prison where your every ls and cd command can be attested.
Oh, Rust is memory safe. Good luck finding holes.
What? As just one example, dm-verity was merged into the mainline kernel 13 years ago. I built immutable, verified Linux systems at least ten years ago, and it was considered old hat by the time I got there.
> The best you could do was, TiVoization, but that would be too obvious and won't fly.
What does this even mean? "TiVoization" is the slang for "you get a device that runs Linux, you get the GPL sources, but you can't flash your own image on the device because you don't own the keys." This is the exact same problem then as it was now and just as "obvious?"
I understand the fears that come from client attestation (certainly, the way it has been used on Android has been majorly detrimental to non-Google ROMs), but, to the Android point, the groundwork has always been there.
I'd be very annoyed if someone showed up and said "we're making a Linux-based browser attestation system that your bank is going to partner on," but nobody has even gone this direction on Windows yet.
> Oh, Rust is memory safe. Good luck finding holes.
I break secure boot systems for a living and I'd say _maybe_ half of the bugs I find relate to memory safety in a way Rust would fix. A lot of systems already use tools which provide very similar safety guarantees to Rust for single threaded code. Systems are definitely getting more secure and I do worry about impenetrable fortresses appearing in the near future, but making this argument kind of undermines credibility in this space IMO.
and each time the doors have been blasted wide off by huge security vulnerabilities
the attack surface is simply too large when people can execute their own code nearby
1. How will the company make money? (You have probably been asked that a million times :).)
2. Similar to the sibling: what are the first bits that you are going to work on.
At any rate, super cool and very nice that you are based in EU/Germany/Berlin!
2. Given the team, it should be quite obvious there will be a Linux-based OS involved.
Our aims are global but we certainly look forward to playing an important role in the European tech landscape.
I take it that you are not at this stage able to provide details of the nature of the path to revenue. On what kind of timescale do you envisage being able to disclose your revenue stream/subscribers/investors?
As I understand it, the main customers for this sort of thing are companies making Tivo-style products - where they want to use Linux in their product, but they want to lock it down so it can't be modified by the device owner.
This can be pretty profitable; once your customers have rolled out a fleet of hardware locked down to only run kernels you've signed.
See: “it’s just an init system”where it’s now also a resolver, log system, etc.
I can buy good intentions, but this opens up too much possibility for not-so-good-intended consequences. Deliberate or emergent.
I have this fond memory of that Notary in Germany who did a remote attestation of me being with him in the same room, voting on a shareholder resolution.
While I was currently traveling on the other side of the planet.
This great concept that totally will not blow up the planet has been proudly brought to you by Ze Germans.
No matter what your intentions are: It WILL be abused and it WILL blow up. Stop this and do something useful.
[While systemd had been a nightmare for years, these days its actually pretty good, especially if you disable the "oh, and it can ALSO create perfect eggs benedict and make you a virgin again while booting up the system!" part of it. So, no bad feelings here. Also, I am German. Also: Insert list of history books here.]