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I read the federal government’s Zero-Trust Memo so you don’t have to

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656 points EthanHeilman | 1 comments | 27 Jan 22 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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staticassertion ◴[27 Jan 22 15:56 UTC] No.30102061[source]▶
This is pretty incredible. These aren't just good practices, they're the fairly bleeding edge best practices.

1. No more SMS and TOTP. FIDO2 tokens only.

2. No more unencrypted network traffic - including DNS, which is such a recent development and they're mandating it. Incredible.

3. Context aware authorization. So not just "can this user access this?" but attestation about device state! That's extremely cutting edge - almost no one does that today.

My hope is that this makes things more accessible. We do all of this today at my company, except where we can't - for example, a lot of our vendors don't offer FIDO2 2FA or webauthn, so we're stuck with TOTP.

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c0l0 ◴[27 Jan 22 18:23 UTC] No.30104121[source]▶
I think 3. is very harmful for actual, real-world use of Free Software. If only specific builds of software that are on a vendor-sanctioned allowlist, governed by the signature of a "trusted" party to grant them entry to said list, can meaningfully access networked services, all those who compile their own artifacts (even from completely identical source code) will be excluded from accessing that remote side/service.

Banks and media corporations are doing it today by requiring a vendor-sanctioned Android build/firmware image, attested and allowlisted by Google's SafetyNet (https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...), and it will only get worse from here.

Remote attestation really is killing practical software freedom.

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1. nonameiguess ◴[27 Jan 22 21:14 UTC] No.30106792[source]▶
In practice, the DoD right now uses something called AppGate, which downloads a script on-demand to check for device compliance, and it supports free software distributions, but the script isn't super sophisticated and relies heavily on being able to detect the OS flavor and assumes you're using the blessed package manager, so right now it only works for Debian and RedHat descended Linux flavors. It basically just goes down a checklist of STIG guidelines where they are practical to actually check, and doesn't go anywhere near the level of expecting you to have a signed bootloader and a TPM or checking that all of the binaries on your device have been signed.