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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. lmeyerov ◴[27 Jan 22 23:13 UTC] No.30108409[source]▶
Yep

I'd feel 100% differently about this stuff if the NSA or some other cybersecurity gov arm making these rules used their massive cybersecurity budgets to provide free MFA, TLS, encrypted DNS, etc., whether US gov hosted or via non-profit (?) partners like LetsEncrypt.

OSS & free software otherwise has a huge vendor tax to actually get used. As is, this feels like economic insecurity & anti-competition via continued centralization to a small number of megavendors. Rules like this should come with money, and not to primes & incumbents, but utility providers.

Sure, our team is internally investing in building out a lot of this stuff, but we have security devs & experience, while the long tail of software folks use doesn't. The gov sets aside so much $$$$ for the perpetual cyber war going on, but not for simple universal basics here :(