Re: [Tails-dev] Serious issue: fail-safe and hotplugging

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Author: anonym
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To: The Tails public development discussion list
Old-Topics: Re: [Tails-dev] Serious issue: fail-safe and hotplugging
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Serious issue: fail-safe and hotplugging
06/01/14 16:58, intrigeri wrote:
> sorry for the delay, and sorry in advance for the bad mood that
> probably impacts this email, I'm a bit grumpy today.


:)

> anonym wrote (31 Dec 2013 00:45:51 GMT) :
>> 30/12/13 13:48, intrigeri wrote:
>>> anonym wrote (29 Dec 2013 21:21:35 GMT) :
>>>> 27/12/13 18:05, intrigeri wrote:
>>>> Approach 1
>>>> ----------
>>>
>>>> A seemingly obvious fix would be to move the fail-safe from its current
>>>> location, tails-unblock-network, into tails-spoof-mac, which is run by
>>>> the MAC spoofing udev hook when network devices are added. The fail-safe
>>>> would then act on a per-device basis, and it would be closer to the
>>>> spoofing, which both are nice (bonus: the problem you raised about
>>>> "macchanger can't retrieve the permanent MAC address" would be really
>>>> easy to fix).
>>>
>>> I like this approach, and I hope we can make it work fine. Let's see.

[...]

Let's just drop all these sub-discussions. I'm in complete agreement
with you now. Approach #1 it is!

>> Hmm. I just think I came up with a fix that makes Approach #1 robust (it
>> can be used for Approach #2 too, but it doesn't make as much sense): we
>> use ferm/iptables to drop all outgoing traffic from interfaces that have
>> not been explicitly said to be "ok" by the fail-safe code.

[...]
> I'm not convinced that this added code, design complexity, and thus
> difficulty to audit is more likely to protect our users than the lack
> of it. AIUI, the only bonus is for a corner case, which the potential
> drawbacks are for everybody.


Agreed. Looking back at all this I don't know what I was thinking. I'm
honestly sorry for having forced you through all this crap.

> But perhaps I just want to see this branch merged ASAP in some
> acceptable state, and am starting to get tired of thinking about it.
> The current state + a few documented known issues + the small fixes
> I've asked for a while ago, would be already much better than what our
> users have in hand right now.


All this is done, as per my other replies. I've also implemented
approach #1 and fixed #6552. See commits 7b7ba02d..e85b325. It's all
pushed into feature/mac-spoof, both Tails and Greeter repos, and I've
built a new Tails Greeter snapshot, uploaded it, and merged the feature
branch + APT suite into experimental.

In summary, tickets #6552, #6540, #6550, #6111 and #6541 are now in your
court. :)

Cheers!