this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
44 points (95.8% liked)

Technology

81611 readers
4451 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The creator of systemd (Lennart Poettering) has recently created a new company dedicated to bringing hardware attestation to open source software.

What might this entail? A previous blog post could provide some clues:

So, let's see how I would build a desktop OS. The trust chain matters, from the boot loader all the way to the apps. This means all code that is run must be cryptographically validated before it is run. This is in fact where big distributions currently fail pretty badly. This is a fault of current Linux distributions though, not of SecureBoot in general.

If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.

There are lots of others who are equally concerned about this possibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

top 22 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

This is needed. Servers need it, and it would be a nice feature to enable for personal systems. We would need to be able to build our own images with our own keys to really make this worthwhile. Especially with programs in my bin dir I’ve compiled or downloaded.

Do I trust Lennart to not do something asinine to turn this into a shit show? I do not. This would be better if it was someone who has security experience and system design cred.

[–] tomalley8342@lemmy.world 6 points 43 minutes ago* (last edited 43 minutes ago)

I can't imagine anyone sane would hold onto the belief that it will remain just "a nice feature to enable" after looking at the historical encroachment of commercial interests in mobile phone boot chain setups. I tell you the truth that after widespread adoption this WILL turn into a "not nice feature that you cannot disable", and you can forget about enrolling your own keys as well.

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 2 points 23 minutes ago

I wonder if this would allow an anti-cheat system to get acceptable trust of a system without having to access ring 0.

Of course, we'd then need the OS / kernel images to be signed. I think most gamers run stock kernels anyway.

I just don't want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn't profitable to Google.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Secureboot is worthless if the Microsoft keys are still enabled. It should only allow code that you sign yourself to boot.

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca -3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

If the end user can arbitrarily sign code themselves that is bootable then it kind of defeats the purpose of secure boot.

The whole idea is that it makes it impossible to start if the chain of trust is broken.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 hour ago

It keeps someone from booting code that hasn't been signed with my key. That's the whole point of secure boot. If someone else has the key, then it's not secure anymore.

[–] Retail4068@lemmy.world -1 points 25 minutes ago* (last edited 24 minutes ago)

The anti MS morons who don't understand secure boot and just regurgitating we hate this because it's associated with them are out 🙄

[–] baronvonj@piefed.social 21 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Because if there's one thing Linux users think about their systems .. it's "hey why does this thing let me do what I want?"

[–] breezeblock@lemmy.ca 16 points 2 hours ago

There’s a universe of difference between changes you intended to make in your system, and changes you didn’t intend because a state actor attacked you based on your social media criticism.

Unlike with closed source software, you can always decide you don’t want your software to be secure.

What you should be worried about is not software but hardware.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Uhhhh...wha?

This would be a big deal for hardware manufacturers or product manufacturers in securing their devices. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of Linux users are just desktop jockeys.

[–] baronvonj@piefed.social 13 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

I was referring to this

If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

What if the thing that you want is to have SecureBoot-enforced hardware attestation?

[–] baronvonj@piefed.social 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

What if it was just an off the cuff joke?

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

This is too many dependent probabilities

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world -3 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

That would be beneficial to users as well. I'm not understanding the downside here.

[–] baronvonj@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I guess you're not thinking of "locked down" in terms of independent developers finding the iOS and Android "play by our rules and be distributed thru our app store or we'll make it hard for users to run your software" to be a barrier to distribution.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 40 minutes ago

Bruh...that's not even the point of the company or what he's talking about. You're being paranoid, first off.

Second, you want secure devices? You can't have that right now with Linux very easily. There is no chain of trust coming from the hardware aside from TPM, which is kind of a joke. This guy wants to make a standard way of certifying a chain of trust which would allow an ecosystem of devices to maintain some semblance of trust amongst itself and other devices. This would make things like networks, edge devices, forward deployed hardware, and running sensitive data in less than secure locations more secure.

Last, if you're going to be paranoid, at least educate yourself on the subject. Not a single person who is even vaguely familiar with what this entails is thinking "Oh they're going to lock all our devices rawrawrawr". That's just ridiculous. That could happen now, but...you seeing that out in the components world anywhere? Absolutely not. Because it's no desirable, and that's NOT WHAT HES EVEN TALKING ABOUT.

🤦

[–] deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Only being able to install "allowed" apps is not great for freedom.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world -1 points 39 minutes ago (1 children)

Not even how that works FFS. You're not the target audience here.

Y'all really need to start reading more about things before jumping to ridiculously uninformed conclusions and making comments. My gosh.

[–] deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 1 points 29 minutes ago (1 children)

Hey you fucking idiot, iPhones need to be jailbroken for that and Android is about to be locked down so developers will need to identify themselves to Google.

Get your condescending ass out of my face. I'm not in the damn mood for a random fucking stranger to tell me I'm an idiot for commenting on someone else's speculation. This is a lot meaner than I normally am, but I happen to be grumpy right now and you don't matter to me at all, so I will continue on to say: Fuck your unhelpful ass.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 11 minutes ago

Seems like more of a "you" problem for not understanding the problem or solutions being discussed. Seems like maybe you probably just shouldn't have commented at all, huh?

Amutable are a gaggle of fucks