- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- technews@radiation.party
The aftermath to the recent Microsoft Azure hack by suspected PRC actors.
What is the solution to this? Make sure cloud services are open source so they can be independently vetted? If government and corporate entities chose to use open source solutions, most are presented “as is” with no warranty.
Funny how on the consumer side, they keep pushing TPMs and other intrusive technologies under the guise of security, and they can’t even keep their shit together on the business end long enough for people to actually believe them.
Edit: Typo
It really is ridiculous at this point. Just a few weeks back they renamed one of their products on the backend (for no good reason) and broke a ton of stuff with no recourse besides “fix it yourself”. Pile on the endless updates and constant vulnerabilities and I don’t see how anyone can willingly choose to build new projects on it. They can’t even ship a usable replacement to win32!
On second thought though, pretty much every recent super-scalable cloud enterprise project of note is not Windows-centric anymore. Docker? Redis? Grafana? Kubes? The list goes on.
Security theater. Like always.
I gotta stand up for my boy TPM. I manage a lot of Windows systems, and TPM does a lot of heavy lifting. I’m an open source advocate, but I recognize that without TPM, most users wouldn’t bother with encrypting their device.
And since Microsoft has strongly integrated it in their stack, it significantly reduces the need for regular signins and user focused security. Of course, this does require you to invest in their stack. There’s little to no support for machine level authentication for Linux. But in business, it really does make a practical and useful difference in security.
Oh yeah. Of course old tpm (1.2) that was the only key to the Castle isn’t great in the hand of someone with some know how and alligator clips since it communicated in clear text at the bus level so key extraction was possible. But for most folks security model, who cares. If it was a risk the business handled it with a pass phrase and tpm.
Apple does security prettt well and integrated too. Especially for most that don’t care.