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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • As another poster mentioned, QubesOS with anti evil maid will work, but that’s the defense against state actors too and is overkill for this threat model.

    BitLocker or any FDE using SecureBoot and PCR 7 will be sufficient for this (with Linux you also need PCRs 8+9 to protect against grub and initramfs attacks). Even if they can replace something in the boot chain with something trusted, it’ll change PCR 7 and you’d be prompted to unlock with a recovery key (don’t blindly enter it without verifying the boot chain and knowing why you’re being prompted).

    With Secure Boot alone, the malicious bootloader would still need to be trusted (something like BlackLotus).

    Also make sure you have a strong BIOS password and disable boot from USB, PXE, and anything else that isn’t the specific EFI bootloader used by your OS(es).





  • Not that it’s my first recommendation for security reasons, and I would never do this in prod, but you can just add the self-signed cert to the local trusted root CA store and it should work fine. No reg changes needed.

    If you do this, put it in the store of the user running the client, not LocalMachine. Then you just need to make sure you connect as something in the cert’s SAN list. An IP might work (don’t know since I never try to put IPs in the SAN list), but just use a hosts entry if you can’t modify local DNS.

    Edit: after reading the full OP post (sorry), I don’t think it’s necessarily the self-signed cert. If the browser is connecting with https:// and presenting a basic auth prompt, then https is working. It almost sounds like there is a 301/302 redirect back to http after login. Check the Network tab of the browser’s dev pane (F12) to see what is going on.




  • Microsoft uses TPM PCRs 7+11 for BitLocker which is more secure than the Linux implementations mentioned in the article.

    PCR 7 is the Secure Boot measurement which means it can’t be unlocked unless every signed boot component has not been tampered with up to the point of unlock by the EFI bootloader. PCR 11 is simply flipped from a 0 to a 1 by the bootloader to protect the keys from being extracted in user land from an already booted system.

    The article is correct that most Linux implementations blindly following these kinds of “guides” are not secure. Without additional PCRs, specifically 8 and 9 measuring the grub commands (no single-user bypass) and initrd (which is usually on an unencrypted partition), it is trivial to bypass. But the downside of using these additional PCRs is that you need to manually unlock with a LUKS2 password and reseal the keys in TPM whenever the kernel and or initrd updates.

    Of course to be really secure, you want to require a PIN in addition to TPM to unlock the disk under any OS. But Microsoft’s TPM-only implementation is fairly secure with only a few advanced vulnerabilities such as LogoFAIL and cold boot attacks.







  • Bitlocker is extra vulberable because it stores the key in the TPM and requires no password to boot. An attacker can extract the key even if the computer is off when they get it.

    This is not true.

    You would additionally need to bypass Secure Boot with a separate exploit such as the one in this article (which is mitigated by disabling USB boot) or LogoFAIL to put the TPM PCRs in a state where the keys can be released.

    LUKS2 is no different here as either can be TPM-only or require a separate PIN.




  • An SSO-like payment system with tracking and revocation is a great idea and would be amazing for us consumers. I’m just not holding my breath waiting for the corpos to implement it.

    While nowhere near perfect (far from it, really), as long as the sites you are shopping on are PCI-compliant (most should be), you don’t have to worry too much about a compromised site leaking your payment details for use elsewhere.

    Basically just use a password manager and don’t worry about saving credit card (NOT debit card) details in the site as long as they aren’t extra-sketchy.




  • I disagree. You should not immediately go and replace the OS as soon as you get it.

    Most modifications to the root filesystem persist through updates just fine. You simply need to add the relevant exclusions for your customizations. See the Development and Modding section here.

    I have a significant amount of modifications to Steam OS, including an encrypted home partition (while excluding the steamapps subdirectory via bind mount) protected by TPM.

    The only time an update breaks anything is if the kernel or initramfs updates, requiring me to re-enter the LUKS password and reenroll a new TPM protector. And this is only because they don’t support Secure Boot, so my PCR selection is limited. And I was on the Beta update channel for a while updating almost weekly without issue.