I sometimes wonder whether he is on the NSA payroll. Lennart Poettering and Moxie Marlinspike are two people NSA should really strive to buy and/or intimidate.
I'm sure the NSA is happy about unauthenticated initrds. I'd be very surprised if such manipulation was never used in practice.
Huh? There are not really any Kernel or bootloader changes proposed here, just signing them and using existing functionality within them. (Okay, I guess he proposes adjusting the Kernel to optionally have a way to authenticate parameters, but is that really “taking over”?)
As for initrd, he’s just talking about adjusting the way their generated to be more static and modular to simplify signing. Yes, there’s some tooling to do this proposed as part of the systemd organizational umbrella, but systemd isn’t a monolithic thing.
Regardless, and just like systemd, you don’t have to use any of this if you don’t want to.
https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-wh...
Sinal's reliance on phone numbers and their point on encrypted e2e communication facilitates meta-information gathering for the governments of the world.
As for Pottering, he is an old-time RedHat employee, and RedHat is supplying virtually all governments of the world.