So you can be forgiven for thinking, Megan you never do five star predictions. This booktube staple video five star predictions, the books that I think I'm gonna give five stars and that's because I refuse to do a new one until I have read the books from the first one. The last one I did was almost two years ago and I still haven't read all the books. Oh my goodness I'm so embarrassed. You could also be forgiven for thinking, Megan if you think you're gonna give them five stars shortly they're the books you're gonna read the quickest and that would make logical sense but it's not what's happened. So I realized that I've still got about three books that I haven't read from five star predictions video that I did two years ago. I was still living in Leeds my little old flat there and I just decided enough is enough. Enough is enough we're gonna read the books okay. So the three books that we're gonna be reading this vlog are five star predictions but I have been putting them off for so long that they've also become the books that I'm very nervous to read now. So let's chat about them. First we have got Mexican Gothic by Silvia Marina Garcia. I put this on the list because it was like such a big book at the time everyone was reading it everyone was loving it and I was just convinced that I was gonna love it too. If you've been here you know it's become a book that I'm terrified to read. All I know about it is that we've got a protagonist and her cousin has recently married the sky and the cousin writes to her saying oh I think he's gonna try and kill me there's stuff to do with the family there and she goes to live with the cousin and try and figure out what's going on that's all I really know. So yeah five star fiction everyone. Sure I'm gonna be nervous. Then we also have Snow White Lens Witchcraft by Theodora Goss. Theodora Goss as you guys know is the author of my favorite series ever and this is a collection of short stories and poems by her and I put it on here because everything I've read by Theodora Goss I've given five stars and I don't feel like that's gonna stop now. So I believe I this one is probably the one that I feel most confident about about the three that we've got left like I feel like it's Theodora Goss you know but the fact that it's a short story and poetry collection I feel like that's also difficult to get a five star because you're not gonna love every poem and every short story like five star. Do you know what I mean? So we'll see and then we have also got Wild Beauty by Annemarie Mackamore. I put this on the list I remember because everyone told me I was gonna love Annemarie Mackamore's writing and a lot of people told me that this is where you should start this is like the best book. So that's why I put it on there. So those are the three books it would help if I got them all the right way around. Those are the three books we're gonna be reading in this vlog. Old five star predictions so that I can be freed from that old five star prediction video and eventually in like a couple months do a new one because I feel like two years ago Megan and me Megan are very different people and readers so we want to be freed from the shackles of that old five star prediction video. So yeah I don't know what order we're gonna read them in but let's just go ahead and get started.  Today I decided to start with Wild Beauty. I thought about it I asked my patrons they were like start with Mexican Gothic. We are going to pretend we didn't hear that. But I just feel like Wild Beauty is gonna like ease me into this difficult journey of reading these books that I've been so excited for such a long time but have been avoiding. So I'm gonna start this but we are going out me and Tom are going out to do some shopping today I want to get maybe some more exercise clothes maybe some trainers maybe some more lounge wear that kind of stuff. So we're going out shopping today and hopefully we're going to go to a restaurant that I've wanted to try for ages. So I'll take you along with us but yeah that's the plan for the day and maybe this evening or tomorrow I'll check in with you with my first chicken for Wild Beauty. I'm hoping if I say it quick I won't think about it and think about how long I've wanted to read this and that I'm finally reading it and the pressure of that can't take the pressure of it. Anyways let's go. Something about the video but I thought I would check in with you about Wild Beauty. I am halfway through and I'm really enjoying it. Here's the thing it doesn't oh squeaky chair um it doesn't feel like a five star yet so but I am really enjoying it. No that sounds bad guys and forgive me for saying it but that's how I feel. So we're following uh this group of cousins so within this family lineage they all live on the same property they can't leave and there's always five daughters born so we have like five grandmothers five mothers and five daughters. Anyone that they love disappears and they can all like make flowers. It's all very magical fantastical listen and there's a boy who turns up they don't know where he's come from is he like a lost love from hundreds of years ago from someone in their family that's like come back for some reason that's kind of what's happening and they have to save their house. There's kind of like an insidious man who might try and kick them off the property and they're only really safe living on this property because of magic and magic reasons and a lot going into this book. I don't want to tell you all of it. Anyway that's enough. There's something about Annemarie Mackamaw's writing that is unlike anything I've ever read before and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. It's got this like the way it looks at the world is so unique the way it articulates in this it's got this beautiful writing right it's lush it's vivid and the way that it articulates feelings and emotions and desires is really interesting. It's really interesting. I'm enjoying it. I'm not like wow this is five stars which you know this is a five star prediction video but I'm having a lovely time reading it. I'm loving I think this kind of concept of this family of all these women with all these relationships is very interesting particularly amongst the cousins and also the cousins all love the same girl and that's very interesting and their relationship with one another and the boy the boy kind of doesn't remember where he's come from and him learning and them teaching him stuff. I'm just really enjoying it like it reminds me of when I read Gallant which was a recent four star where I read it and I was like oh I just this is a good four star. Like this is like great enjoyable four star and I love that. Not every book has to be a five star and I'm glad that I'm finally reading something from anime macaw because I want to read all of their stuff. The writing still feels like unknowable untouchable to me. Do you know what I mean? It still feels like I don't truly I'm not truly like acquainted with the writing and I don't feel like I'm gonna be that until it gets to the end of the book. It's still a bit unusual and I'm still like figuring it out so yeah I'm gonna try and finish this today. I have the audiobook which I'm enjoying as well so hopefully I'll see you this evening with my final thoughts. But yeah at the moment it's not a five it could become a five if it's an amazing ending. I don't know we'll see. Okay so I just finished Wild Beauty. I don't mean to make you nervous that much. I don't know why I paused so much then. I'm gonna give this four stars. It wasn't quite a five but I did enjoy it so let's talk about it. So I found this book really difficult to talk about. I feel like sometimes you just come across these books that just seem you just struggle to articulate talking about them. There's something about anime macaw's writing and this book I don't know how else to describe it other than it feels nostalgic but I don't know I don't know what that means like it feels like timeless. It feels how I would feel when I was younger reading a fantasy or a magical realism book for the first time and like how that feeling that untangible feeling what that would bring up. I felt like this brought up as well and I don't want to spoil anything but I didn't predict the direction that this book could go in and I really appreciated it and what it was saying and I'm just really excited to read more anime macaw. I feel like I just have to say to you. The reason that it is a four and not a five is that I have I literally finished it like one hour ago and I still feel like there's something about it that was like unknowable to me and not in the like a not in the good way like I was before. There's like I'm like I don't what did I just couldn't see that story like I always felt like a little bit of a distance from it and there were some moments where like I felt like okay I had a picture in my head of what's happening and then like an action what was described that a character was doing and I was like wait a second are we how are we doing that you know what I mean like I missed the part where maybe like so say they were standing up having conversation and then suddenly they're lying down and I missed the part where they went from standing up to lying down stuff like that kind of just took me out of it I was like hold on a second so that's why it's a four and not a five but I'm really excited to read more from anime macaw more I want to read all of their books like I'm so excited to try them all I own the mirror season but I want to try a lot of the other stuff but yeah I would recommend us to people who like you know beautiful lyrical writing it's different you know and it describes actions and thoughts and feelings in a very interesting a different way so yeah I'm glad I finally read it it has been on my tbl for forever this feels like you know kind of a what's the word not momentous enough for what a momentous moment this is but yeah no I enjoyed it didn't love it but I enjoyed it so I actually need to go away from this vlog bye bye and read the video for this month's wrapped up which you will have already have seen but once I've done that I'm gonna start Snow Whitelands Richcraft I'm making you wait for Mexican I'm making you wait we're gonna read that last this feels like a good middle book you know I don't feel like I should end on this this was like a oh I just really got bunged up then this feels like a good you know middle book to read so I'll check with you maybe when I'm like halfway through this it's not very long I'm hoping it won't take me that long to read Theodore Goss wrote The Strange Case of the Alchemist Daughter which is one of my favorite series eight short stories and 24 poems and it's uh retellings of fairy tales so like Theodore Goss can just do like retellings and reimaginings like I just I can feel it her writing is some of my favorite writing I've ever read like it's witty it's funny but it's deep and I love how she explores things that we already are aware of and already know and like kind of picks them apart puts them back together hello hello hello so I'm currently on midday reading spits my patrons and I have gotten I feel like you need to raise up a bit you raise me up so I can stand I'm halfway through Snow Whitelands Richcraft and I'm kind of obsessed I'm loving it guys so I'm halfway through yeah I said that and you can see tabs who is she I have been writing my rating of each one on here eight short stories and 24 poems in this I'm pretty sure all of the short story so far I've given five stars right poems I think are harder to rate like can you really rate a poem I don't know I think I'm gonna judge my rating more on the short stories but we've had like in terms of other ratings like a three a 3.5 and then I'm pretty sure everything else has been a 4 or 5 I am obsessed I am obsessed all you need to know about this is that it's basically fairy tale retelling so one of the early short stories is it's called what is it called the rose in 12 petals this was a five star it's a retelling of sleeping beauty but it's told from 12 different perspectives so we have the witch the queen the magician the king the queen dowager the spinning wheel we read from the spinning wheels perspective the princess the gardener the tower the tower the hound the prince and the rose how cool is that like this story of split into these 12 sections I just loved it I am loving it so much it reminds me of what I loved so much about strange case where Xerox was taking these characters or you know character adjacents that we knew so well from classic guitar and literature doc jekyll mr hide sherlock and reimagining it and keeping the magic and the you know what we love about classic victorian literature the vibes but making it new and making it feminist and making it cool and that's what she's doing with fairy tales like she's reimagining these in such a cool way and I I don't even know how to describe to you how obsessed I I've never felt such an affinity to an author's writing like I do with theodora gas the obsession that I got with it was was borderline unhealthy I don't know how I'm going to integrate in society there's just something about the way that she uses language and words that makes me believe in life it makes me believe love is real I don't even know how to describe it to you it's not like lyrical beautiful writing like say a lany taylor on erin morgan stone but it has especially this one because it's fairy tale retellings got this like fairy tale like clever wit imagination it's giving me a production it's giving me a moment it's making a memory like that is what I want and she's doing it I'm so enjoying it you guys you don't even understand like I'm obsessed I'm really really enjoying myself so I'm just going to go ahead and read the second half it doesn't take that long I'm actually reading it slower than I would usually so when I'm not reading along physically I'm listening at 1.5 speed and when I am I'm only listening at a 2 and usually I would say my listening speeds are like 1.8 and 2.8 for with the book or not with the book so I'm reading it a lot slower than I would usually but I'm just wanting to savor it and take it in and take in the meaning and take in the moment I'm loving it oh I didn't even tell you there's one of the short stories it has a family of talking cats and we have like one of the main characters of talking cat I just this is what it feels like to be god's favorite honestly like talking cats get out of here talking cats what what what more could you want anyways I'm gonna go get back on the sprints and read a bit more but I'm in love but yeah definitely preferring the short stories to the poems but the poems are still great but you can't really rate a poem but I'm just having the best time okay bye good morning good morning good morning I just woke up did my skincare finished snow white lens witchcraft and my immediate thought when I finished this was what the fuck am I gonna rate this because for me most of the short stories in this were like a four four point five five predominantly fives I would say it was the largest number out of all of those but the poems weren't I'd say I had a few five star poems but then most of them were probably like a four maybe even a three point five and I've been thinking about it and like I said before right when I read a poetry collection I don't rate every poem because you kind of just take everything as the whole right but when you read a short story collection I think it is fair to rate each short story to kind of figure out what rating you want to give it but I don't know but I've been thinking about it and my amazement and my love for this my wow and you know when you're just reading a book you go oh yeah like it does something different it does something imaginative was so much higher for this than wild beauty so much higher like incredibly higher so to give it a four point five I feel like isn't reflective enough of what I loved about this so I'm giving it a five I'm giving it a five it's not adding up it's maybe a five star short story and poetry collection which doesn't have the same enjoyment level as like a five star novel for me perhaps do you know what I mean but I just love Theodoric Roses writing I don't know what else to tell you this woman I am obsessed there was so many cool short stories and so many the short stories all had different vibes to them like there was some that were more kind of like historical twisting what a fairy tale is but there was one also where it's like this witch and she goes back to the school that she studied at it's very like the school is set it almost was like what's the word of that show that everyone watches that I haven't watched but I've seen parts of Gilmore girls yes you know there's like a coffee book shop and it feels very quaint American town the school is in and she has to travel to this other world as a witch to find her shadow and that kind of had that like I don't know yeah like American Gilmore girls vibe to it whereas other ones have this like historical fantastical complete other world vibe to them which I really appreciated they all had this fairy tale element running through them but they had really different vibes to them which I really enjoyed so yeah apparently Theodoric Roses can't do any wrong and we got on we got a five star from five star predictions let's all dance everyone so yeah I really I loved it I loved it there's a really lovely one near the end that's kind of based on Ariel as well so anyways today I Mexican gothic is I didn't grab it it's over there somewhere um I'm hoping to read all of Mexican gothic today this video is up tomorrow and I just feel like I can do it I have got this evening a zoom call with some of my patrons and a quiz night with my patrons so yeah that takes up some time but it's about one o'clock now so I'm hoping if I just really focus I'll be able to make my way through a good chunk of Mexican gothic today Mexican gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia is gonna be five stars it's gonna be five stars so this is a horror I believe this one the Goodreads horror last year oh my god just holding this book oh I have just heard that this really can get into your head hello friends it's very late I'm in bed god this I have this feature on my camera that like means it's not as shaky for you and I'm holding it but it zooms it in so much I'm literally like as far away as I can get right now anyways so I am halfway through Mexican gothic and I'm really enjoying it I'm really enjoying it I love good news love good news I just love good this first section oh let's get comfortable shall we this this first section has been pretty slow but I get the feeling it's about to pop off in the second half so basically all you to know is kind of what I've told you is we're following no I mean she gets a letter from her cousin very distressed saying my my husband's family are trying to poison me yada yada noemi goes there the family's weird as shit they're like very into eugenics red flag red flag red flag they're just they're just like bad vibes like you're not they're not talking at the dinner like what the fuck is going on like we're not we're not vibing and can I just say I have a conspiracy theory that silver maria garcia played Nancy drew curse of blackmore manna it's a conspiracy theory that I'm actually interested in because it is it I mean if you played cast of blackmore manna you know Nancy's friend um everyone's convinced or she's convinced I can't remember like either the woman is convinced or everyone else is convinced that the woman Nancy's friend is turning into a werewolf hello what's going on Lucy hi well a cumbrose oh yeah that was it so she's a werewolf and she so you go to her house this like English house by the way they're like we're in Mexico but like the house is very much like English like white person aesthetics and in cusp of manna you go to this Victorian house and you can't see her much because she's like oh I need to sleep I'm convinced I'm becoming and so you're like talking more to all the weird people who live in the house with her that's exactly what this is like this is so curse of blackmore manna coded it's so true so we're going to see her please tell me did you play cusp of manna I have to know I'm just loving the vibes of this I'm loving the writing noemi is such like a great character to read from the perspective of I'm just obsessed I'm having so much fun it's got this eerie spooky gothic oh god it's got this you know eerie gothic vibes to it and I really feel like every chapter really serves a purpose do you know what I mean like every chapter is important to the story I feel like the plotting and the pacing is really good there's also I didn't know like a little romance between noemi and one of the guys at the house which part of me is written for because he's kind of awkward and cute but also the family like you don't want to get involved with that you've seen what's happened to your cousin you don't want it to be you so also I'm kind of anti it I don't know I sat outside and I read like the first 100 pages whilst my family were doing gardening and it was kind of like it was only just warm enough to sit outside so it was kind of like chilly and I'm like you know in the book there's like this mist around everywhere and I'm like I'm so in the vibe right now the vibe is me and I am the vibe you know I'm gonna try and read some more before I fall asleep because I'm really enjoying it and I would like to get as far through it as possible tonight so we're about to you know that's about to be the vibe anyways night good morning good morning so I read most of the rest of Mexican Gothic last night I have to finish off a little bit this morning because it got really late it was like midnight and listen I'm a grandma that was too late um I've decided I'm gonna give it a 4.5 I know loads of you're like make it just give it a five if you gave Snow White those witchcraft a five when you'd given poems in that like a 3.5 you can give this a five like it's just not quite five that had some of my favorite short stories ever in it whereas this I just had a great time but it wasn't a five that's the truth a five is a feeling a five is a moment a five is an instinct and I don't feel like this is a five but it's a 4.5 I could not put this down I could not put it down this babes it took a turn the first half and this is very slow atmospheric haunting the second half fuck me that was intense it goes places I'm not sure I ever wanted to go I'm not sure I ever wanted to go I just like this is a book that I can recommend to so many people I can see why it's been so popular I can see why so many people have loved it why it's been so widely read because I just think it's a great book you know when you're booking like this is just like perfect well not quite perfect because I'm doing it before I stop that's just me that's me but I did tell a bit of a lie there in terms of writing craft it's it it's it do you know what I mean oh it just did it it did what it needed to do I loved it I'm so glad I have finally read this I was worried as well about reading it all in one day I was like am I gonna be forcing myself through this book that I've waited so long to read am I gonna be doing it a disservice but I could not put it down I would have read it probably in a day whenever I'd read it it is just a solid horror haunted house a little bit roman it's a little bit of an intrigue I'm still convinced it's cursed like my man I coded because there's like a woman in this who's just like a woman in that gate like it's just it's a little bit freaky a little bit freaky if you ask me I think the writing is incredible I think no only is incredible I think the atmosphere created in this the haunting the uncomfortableness like throughout the book you can't really leave the house much as kind of like one of their rules like you know we'll just stay here all the time and I'm like oh my god how are we like I can't imagine like just in the house for your whole life like what oh my god it was just it was such a solid book and I am so glad that I have finally finally read Mexican comic only took me like two years you know no he took me two years so yeah listen let's get the other book oh I do I don't know not as good news I have decided I could just like not say this and then I would have to explain myself but I have to lower my rating for wild beauty to a 3.5 because I only finished this a couple days ago I can't remember anything about it it's like it left my brain and left my memory so I just like to lower it to a 3.5 I still enjoyed a lot of it but I think me losing track of what was happening and not being able to picture certain stuff affected me more than I realized and I gave it the four because I wanted in my heart to believe it was a four but the more I think about it and I think about how much I enjoyed these compared to this I just feel like it's a 3.5 so yeah listen we got a five we got a five it is a bit of a tenuous side it's a short story in poetry collection five it has some of my all-time favorite short stories in it and they just touched my heart in such a way that I couldn't not give it a five but like you know and we had a 4.5 I'm so glad I finally read it so let me know what you thought of any of these down below I would love to know let me know some five star predictions that you have put off for two years if you have you may have better self-control and discipline than me so it might not be a problem but yeah let me know what five stars you have been holding off on reading if you got to end the video or comment an apple emoji comment an apple for snow white down below if you got to the end thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you very soon in another video bye


So here's a new nice very thin laptop right here. So this is the successor to the 200 series, right? Yes, this is the new X390 Now we've redesigned this laptop from the ground up. So last generation the X280 was a 12.5 inch display For this generation, we've updated to a 13.3 inch display and you're gonna have the awesome bright HDR display panel offerings as well as FHD if you wanted The big thing about this device is you get a bigger display this year Same footprint as a 12.5 inch laptop from last year And obviously it has all our built-in think pad durability think pad security We've done a lot to improve the bio security features. We've added our think shutter camera blocker to all our think pads now And Match on chip fingerprint sensor is more robust. What is that match on chip? What does that mean? So match on chip means all all the authentication all the processing happens on the chip and not with the systems So it's more secure. It's more secure. So it's all isolated the security or authentication all isolated Secure environment area place and maybe with its own little chip. Yes Exactly match on chip What's the code The ports and yeah, the port so you get a full array of ports here usb type a Kensington lock on that side B3 speed right? Yes.  It's a mechanical docking So if you're a customer who has a dock or you're a company that has a lot of docs You all all our docs are one doc works with all our new think pads now So you don't have to have multiple different docs different solutions and our doc works really on the functionality It is really easy to use add everything out there. What's that multiple 4k outputs and all that stuff Yes, with the doc. These are Thunderbolt 3 ports right here Thunderbolt 3 that you get 40 gigabit 30 Gigabit 40 yeah 40 gigabit so you can do a whole bunch of USB 3's And dual 4k displays, right exactly lots of stuff It's very thin. There's no replaceable battery. No replaceable battery You can't have a thick battery, right? So no replaceable battery, but very thin device this in essence is one of our smallest laptops in terms of size Battery life is long better life is long. We're rating it It really depends on your use case, but I believe the rating is about yeah 12 hours or so Yeah, depending depends on what your configuration often obviously we're offering 4k displays with this so it may change your Let's put it on the table right here Anything happened with the keyboard? It's just the same keyboard as you've been doing Same keyboard same keyboard as we've been doing Obviously all the mil-spec testing Thinkpads are known for their durability and mil-spec testing. How is that compared to the last one? Same same How's the performance and the price also the performance you're gonna get a full 4i7 processors you get the We also have a privacy guard feature The privacy There to keep the memory to about a storage 48 one-hours battery up to 17 hours depending on your display configuration you get the regular FHD panel to get that And yeah, just a great great formula device. Obviously. It's not going to be for a high-performance workstation Way now cases You have a nice It's fast No, no, no discreet graphics. How about a external GPU possibly? Yes, if you that's what you want to do with it But that you do over type C or thunderbolt. Yeah, you can do that over thunderbolt So there it is and the price and the price price on this is going to be a little bit different But for us it's going to be a tin starting price of 1099 available in june And in Europe and the rest of the world it'll be available around April timeframe or about 999 starting price


earthquake bro it's earthquake right now there's an earthquake going on on everybody welcome to a special 626 night market version of fun grows food we are here at the 626 night market at the Toyota SoCal booth we're having a little meet and greet and then we're gonna show you some of the most Instagramable tasty food here at the night market you know we had to bring rich what's up it's the fun goes but now it's a party let's go so one of the cool things that we're doing here is we're handing out some prizes you win to get a $5 food voucher for the night market winner winner you can buy a chicken dinner here guys this is our first food at the 626 night market the asteroid fries I said we said this looks like Captain Crunch on fries so here oh it does because of the shape it's not though it's not this is hot cheeto like puffs and then you got carne asada fries cheese and sauce wow but even the carne asada has been cut to almost resemble a nugget asteroid fries flavors come together it all works together I love the flavor I think obviously it's a lot of prize I think if you were sharing amongst five or six people this would be a go to this would fill up five people easily I can't get what David said out of my head though I keep thinking they're the cereal oh Richie went in for a second bite here we have the main squeeze this is a lemonade jar you know kind of like a mason jar David you have a piggy bank you're right love money they also love pigs yo I have never seen a piggy bank drink before the night market they have the most like Instagrammable things and you have some sort of lavender lemonade you got a picture David this is pretty fire this up it tastes really fresh though David I like the message that they're sending with this one because they're telling kids spend money to buy this but then it comes with a piggy bank so that you can save money we got Samuel Chen right here from Sichuan half black half Sichuan you got to be a pretty good rapper now because all the rappers are coming up with the Toyota booth here at the 626 night market has a ton of stuff going on there's not just food there's not just pictures they got a basketball court skills challenge going on Toyota we got to go wow he was not joking there's actually a full half court right now right there with the sunset let's do it all right whoever has the most points in 45 seconds it's a big one you're wow outside all right that gets them to make it happen I Got a zip up the fear of God's man. I got a Richie's uses those fear of God's for what they're meant for basketball He's a clear winner I believe It looks like a bun me that's a bunch. Is that a bummy rich because this is a sandwich, right? Okay, if you want to call it that can we unravel it here. Let's do it I think the bun is cotton candy. It's trying to be like a baguette. That's my fun The creativity level here at the Night Market is insane. Everything looks amazing. How does it taste though?  You got a sweet tooth. That's a good one though. Oh This is everything I think Nelson would love this so right here we got the crab noodles with sun-dried tomatoes Which I know you like crab that's crabby noodles are nice chewy. Hey This is good. That is buttery. We're gonna take a quick break from the savory items I'm pretty pebbles churro. What do you pebble? This is a classic combination. Really good I know I know my man like luxurious things. So what is this right here bone marrow, but a gold bone marrow? You know has that little a gold spray on it.  No flavor at all, but aesthetically looks really cool. Whoa No, you need it with a lot of the carb. Yeah, cuz it's that succulent You're paying for so much you get so little Yeah, that's what's kind of tricky about bone marrow. Well, it's a luxury because there's not that much to eat Yeah, but obviously the bone is big for a night market to be carrying this item This is a luxury item. So man, let me just taste this one real quick. Hold on So right here you're looking at a milk tea with cheese foam on the top I like when the cheese foam is almost like a cheesecake where it has this like slight saltiness to it All right, you guys three of us three masubis rich to the guest what which one you thinking? I have a thing. I think I have a spicy tuna with Hot Cheetos on top. Looks like I have some sort of pepper grilled beef. I've got I think some type of pork Or something like that with some avocado underneath. Masubi Boat When there's that much in a Masubi It really tastes more like an onigiri. That's good I think when I'm expecting like a Masubi flavor, I kind of want the spam and That's kind of what I was looking for. I respect the desire to modernize the Masubi. Yeah Y'all know one of my favorite things growing up to eat one of my favorite snacks was the dirt cup Which is a crushed Oreo on chocolate pudding with the gummy worms. Wow, these cookie crumbs are not your usual cookie crumbs It's a little bit chewy like there's like Yogurland, what do you think about the They want to make sure people walk around and you say hey Where did you get that because you can't taste something walking around and looking at it? But you could obviously want to get the bag Boba this this was very light You know Asia Asia's been on back. You know when we were just in China a lot of bad stuff Have ramen burger this looks a little bit more gourmet a little bit more hipster thinner ramen patty I think that's good because usually the ramen patty is This one I like that you could actually see the cheese and the meat. It looks like a real burger Man, this event is really evolved over the years, huh? It's a lot in a way It's almost like I feel like people here at the night market like they come up all the time the other ramen burgers I had there's too much ramen The bun is too big, but no, it's thin even you can tell visually it feels like a regular burger Oh, it's a earthquake Right now there's an earthquake going on the only thing is this thing, but this thing looks pretty pretty sturdy I think that was the first earthquake that we've ever done a video through so go all right. Yo, this is just Fresh squeezed lemonade. You know what I'm gonna call this Earthquake name overall. I got to give a huge shout out to Toyota SoCal. It was amazing They let us borrow a Corolla XSE 2020 The lumbar support. Yes, I don't know if they advertise that or not bang it I was noticing on the outside panel. It has a black gloss. That is nice to Yoda provided something for everybody If you're not into the gifts, you're in the basketball. You're not in the basketball You're in it just chillin here.    Okay Grab noodles. Oh grab noodles in the comment section below Please suggest an item you would love to see pop up at these night markets And I'm sure somebody from the night market might read it the big things to Toyota SoCal We had a great meet and greet pleasure meeting all you guys. Thank you so much for showing up until next time We out peace. I got a question today.  Why can't they make like a durian cotton candy cotton candy is just spun sugar Oh sugar Like syrup like maybe like little bits hot dogs, right the cheese in the middle, but the cheese is Like on some hot ones level 10 out of 10 spicy cheese They need that cheese wheel the one that they melt raclette, you know from that famous restaurant They need it just have it out wheel so you pop it out and just shape it for people


All right. Finally, there is a lot of talk right now, a lot of talk about the normalization of relations between Israel and the Saudi Arabia. There is a lot of talk about the Saudis basically signing a peace deal with Israel and completely normalizing relations. I think the Saudis would like this. They'd like Israeli technology. They'd like, you know, Saudi Arabia is engaging in a multi-year process of trying to diversify its economy away from oil. It's very difficult for the Saudis because they really don't have expertise outside of the oil industry. But Israel is right there. It's a neighbor with some of the most advanced technological expertise in the world. And Saudi Arabia would like to access that. And other Gulf states have already signed peace deals with Israel. And the next obvious one is Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia has a price. And they realize that the Biden administration would like to have a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a trophy, particularly given that there was an election next year. Trump has the Abraham Accords, where the other Gulf states signed a deal with Israel, and Trump is taking credit for it all. Well, Biden would like to be able to take credit for a peace deal with between Israel and Saudi Arabia and be able to, you know, say, look, it wasn't Trump. Even I can do it. I don't think that's how we'd phrase it. And so Saudi Arabia is basically saying, look, we don't really need much from Israel. We don't really care that much about the Palestinians. We'll probably want you to make a statement about how you're going to be nicer to the Palestinians. Maybe you can do some symbolic things that involve being nice to the Palestinians for a little while so we can take credit for it. But we're not speaking too much. But America, if you guys want us to sign a peace deal with Israel, a peace deal with Saudi Arabia will benefit enormously from. But if you guys want me to want us to sign a peace deal with Israel, you have to promise to protect us. You have to sign a defense treaty with us. Basically, that is what Saudi Arabia is demanding right now. It's demanding it from the U.S., not from Israel. It's basically saying, if you, the U.S., want us to sign a peace deal with Israel, you have to provide us with a defense guarantee, right? It could be an Eichlad NATO-style defense guarantee. But we're willing to compromise a little bit. We're willing to get something a little less Eichlad, maybe a treaty like what the U.S. has with some Asian countries that would win U.S. congressional approval. But it might not win U.S. congressional approval, because Congress might not want to sign on to a deal like that with a country like Saudi Arabia. So instead, maybe we could do something like a U.S. agreement with Bahrain, where the U.S. basically is protecting it, the Fifth Fleet is based there, and that doesn't need congressional approval. Oh my God. The United States could basically sign a deal to protect an authoritarian, thuggish, anti-American principles country like Saudi Arabia without congressional approval, just with the president signing something.  And I think it goes counter, I think, to our constitution. We could also, the U.S. could also designate Saudi Arabia, what's called a major non-NATO ally, a status that is already being given to Israel. That's not a guarantee for security, but it's a pretty major step in terms of defense contracts and making it easy to sell weapons to and so on. So basically what Saudi wants is protection. This should be familiar. This is basically what the Saudis wanted from the United States in World War II. There was a deal between the Saudi family, the Saud family, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, and FDR, which basically exchanged the fee flow of oil for security guarantees. So that was done already by FDR in the middle of World War II. Implicitly, Saudi Arabia has assumed, and we have assumed that we have given them a security guarantee. Indeed, you could argue that the 1991 Gulf War was the United States living up to that security guarantee, that one when you remember when Iraq invaded Kuwait and we kicked Iraq's butt, kicked them out of Kuwait. That was basically at the request of the Saudis and that was part of this security guarantee. So Saudis wanted explicit. They wanted it in writing. And the US would probably give it to them for peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Politics, politics, politics.


trusted boot module, a project they developed as an open hardware module, a project that they're doing to create a trusted bootchain. The two speakers are Guido from Nordende and Marie Weier and I will hand it over to them. Thank you very much. I'm going to talk about our trusted boot module, a subtitled trusted boot on the Olimax holdings in a line, but it actually works on more than just this ARM development board. I'll first give you an introduction about works. We'll talk about the features, the limitations. Then I'll give you a brief overview of the design and then we'll go into each of the most part of the design in more detail. We'll give you a status report of where we are and possibly present future work. So I was briefly introduced, I'll take a few minutes to introduce myself a bit more. I'm currently doing a master's of science in computational science at the University of Amsterdam and I did my bachelor's there as well, I'm hoping to finish very soon. I'm more of a software guide and hardware but I'm trying to transition a bit more to hardware as well, just for fun. I really like Hacker Spaces, the one in Sofia and the one in Amsterdam are both brilliant and actually all the ones I've been to are excellent. And that's all in 2013, I started the foundation in the Netherlands called Heart for Internet Firehide and we're trying to run more exit nodes and make Tor more well known to the general public. So if you're Dutch and you're interested, please contact us there. I work at Widebox Systems, which is initiated by Guido and he'll introduce himself a bit more and I sometimes work for the Internet Archive. Okay, so back to the trustee boot module. There's three main goals here, in contrast to what you might know as UEFI or secure boot, we really want it to be under control. The thing is yours to hold, the thing is yours to hack, the thing is yours to do whatever you want with. So it's not designed to lock you out of your system. Our main personal goal was to prevent permanent compromise of our devices in the field and our trustee boot module has one restriction that we'll get to that more a lot later. It's specifically protecting the device going online and it ensures that it's at that point only running trustee code but it can protect your device forever, like most other boot mechanisms. So I'll briefly hand it over to Guido to provide some context on how and why we made the system. Yeah, okay, yes, I'll just do a brief introduction of myself and the context for the work. Madeleine together with Stephen who's also sitting here, the main technical part. So the context of this project is this little wide box and the wide box is something we've been working on for three years and this is an authorization server that sits with general petitioners and allows general petitioners to authorize specific parties to access medical information. So in contrast to many large scale information exchange systems in healthcare, this one is actually controllable by the doctor and possibly the patient if he has an account on it as well. So we're trying to build mechanisms to allow doctors to authorize other doctors to access content but to keep the access servers and the attack servers very small. This little box sits with general petitioners and we pretend that we have a secure solution and that also suggests that people can trust it but what does that mean because this box is now wide but it's essentially a black box. So what we're trying to do is actually make it a really wide box and to have everything that's in there open and controllable. We have software running on it that's public source. We don't give away the copyright but we do open it up so people can access it and inspect it and we have a re-producible build chain that we've been working on that has not been published yet but we've been working on it. Debian has a similar approach and we're applying it to Gen2 where the source code can be built in a re-producible way such that many people can actually build from the source the same binaries and check that that is actually the binary that runs on this box. Still that does not really make it a trustworthy distributed system. There are many things to consider them and one of the things is do we actually know the software that runs on there. So we need the software to be signed and preferably we need a number of people or parties to sign a software that's been re-producibly built and we need a verification system for that. So the system currently runs on the Audimax boards. It's also been running on a QB board and it could conceivably also run on a Raspberry Poly which is just an ARM based development board with Linux running on it in our own application stack that we're going to publish. The trick is how can we verify the software that runs on it and ensure that if there has been a compromise that it can be restored and removed from the thing because it's a distributed system so we cannot actually walk to the GP and say pull the plug and reconfigure the whole thing. So that is the context why we need a trusted boot manager. We need some mechanism where we can have the system fetch updates. We can control them, verify the signatures and control the boot process. Do regular updates of the system so we reboot every day so you know as a general measure and each time that we boot the system verify that we have the latest updates and the latest version and that's actually been signed by us or maybe other parties. But of course the principle of that is general and so Stichting and LNET has provided us with some funding to actually provide this as an open source not published really open source and open hardware project. So we've been designing the hardware and the software that runs on the MCU on the hardware to do this actual image verification and this protocol to ensure that the boot process is trustworthy and well I'm going to give back control to Malayan who is going to talk about the technical details more. Thank you very much. Okay, let's see. Yeah, this is good. All right, okay. So yeah, so a part of this is that the system will reboot every few days or every day so in case there is a compromise it will at least go back to what is trusted code and then from there on hopefully a load code that's not exploitable again. And specifically it should be very infeasible to permanently compromise such a device remotely. It should be clear at this point I think that local attacks are not our aim here because you own the things or if you take it apart and flash it off. Of course you own it. So Hito briefly talked about the device that we're currently using. It's an Olimax Olimax Xenolime 2 and this is our host device. This is not what the trusted boot module runs on. I'll get to that soon. It's a dual core machine. It has one gigabyte of RAM, SATA, Gigabyte Ethernet, USB and a lot more storage options including SPI North Flash. And it's one of the reasons we're also using it is because it's open hardware. So you can download the schematics, you can verify, you can make the piece of it yourself if you want. Of course open hardware here means that the design is open source but there's no CPU on there that's open source. There's a risk five development board that we are able to use. The trusted boot module essentially always ensures that the system boots to a trusted state. So that means that whatever the CPU starts running it should be our code right away. Usually there's just a tiny bit of code that actually starts with the CPU and then loads code from somewhere but it should load our code as soon as possible and whatever code the CPU is running before loads our code it should be read-only and people should be able to change it remotely. So of course we need to be able to upgrade the operating system so we need to upgrade our kernel. So if our kernel is in a read-only segment then how do you ensure that you get a more recent kernel with a dozen of exploits, those kind of things. And we're hoping to make it relatively cheap for people to produce themselves, take the PCB and assemble it. And we're trying also to handle various levels of complexity in the trusted boot module. You can envision different use cases for a trusted boot module and I'll get into those in more detail a bit later. So with terminology I'll explain all these things again but just to repeat them. The trusted boot module is obvious. Something we call the ROTS is the read-only trusted system. This is the code that we load initially and it's just an image stored read-only in some storage. Obviously when I say flash I'm going to be referring to SPI nor flash here so it's not about NAND flash. There's a big difference in reliability how much you can store on there. SPI nor flash is supposed to be very reliable which should last 10 to 20 years even if you're writing quite a bit to it and NAND is. There's a special art for balancing NAND failures and growing the size of the NAND without causing real failures. This is essentially what SSDs are doing there, just putting in more NANDs. We have the trusted stage and the untrusted stage of the boot process which would be fairly evident. When I say U-boot that's referring to the universal boot loader which is a boot loader you find on lots of MIPS and ARM systems so most of the ARM development boards run U-boot. Most of your Android phones run U-boot in one way or the other. Most of the OpenWRT or even most of the home routers run U-boot in one way. The initial RAM file system is something that Linux loads as soon as it starts so you just have something in RAM that looks like a file system and you can put binaries in there so you don't need to be able to load any root file system. KXEG is a method we use that is in the Linux kernel, I think 1, 2, maybe 3 years, that you can use to load a new kernel from Linux without restarting going through your BIOS again and the whole process so you can actually load a new Linux kernel from Linux. A simplified explanation of the LIME 2 is the trusted boot process on the LIME 2 would be that our code always needs to be executed first and in this trusted stage which we are in when we load the code we can communicate with the trusted boot module. This is a separate hardware device that's connected to the LIME and the LIME itself will cryptographically check the validity of the images so this is very different from a TPM where the TPM has a lot of crypto in there and random number generators and the TPM is purposely very simple so any crypto operations will simply be done on your whole system and of course the whole system will boot new kernels and tell the TPM that there's no longer a reason to trust the code that we're running because it might now be code that we fetched online as an update and we no longer want to be able to communicate with... We no longer want to have privileged access to our trusted boot module for storage reasons or such. So the setup is very simple, there's a LIME 2 board I think Kido has it there right now and there's this thing. This is LIME 2, so this is your ARM based and this is a prototype of TPM. So they fit on each other so the PCB was made to fit on the LIME 2. So how it works is the TPM is a very simple ARM microcontroller it has some form of RTC, some form of battery for the RTC and it actually has storage as well, it also has an SPI Nord flash chip so it can store certificates or keys or log files or specific operating system versions to prevent rollbacks. And the TPM and the LIME they communicate using serial so you simply take UART from both sides, connect them and they can talk with each other. And this of course will work for routers as well or router APIs or non-ARM platforms. And the TPM has some other features that I'll get into later but it should work on most architectures out there and we're hopefully going to take maybe a Libreboot machine next time which is I'm not sure if you know Libreboot but it's a fork of Coreboot which is an open source BIOS that runs on certain machines and it should not use any blobs at all on your system and Libreboot is the blob version of Coreboot. So that might make a nice target or maybe an ORT router for people who really don't want their routers to be compromised permanently. Yeah, so our goal is to prevent remote compromise especially permit remote compromise but that's very difficult so we're trying to reasonably prevent permit remote compromise because there are some exploits that could like there could be some bugs in our read-only firmware for example loading a file system, loading an X4 file system if there's a certain corruption in the X4 file system then the read-only code could be exploited and then before it even starts to load other code you can already break in. That's why it says reasonably. A lot of huge feature for the TBM for us of course is that we can put certificates in there or keys in there that are used to verify updates or images that are being downloaded you can have all the usual X5.09 certificates you can use a CA and you can have multiple keys and multiple certificates in there and our goal is to have a threshold system where we would have three or five parties that all sign the code put their signature on there and those certificates of those parties will be in the trusted boot module and then when an upgrade is downloaded it wouldn't be it has to be signed by at least say three out of five parties so even if one or two parties become compromised or they no longer exist at least we can still distribute the software as I said before the TBM is not a TBM so it doesn't do crypto, it doesn't do keygen we were not planning at all to implement our own crypto on a simple microcontroller unit and it doesn't have a proper source of randomness so that was completely out of our scope and specifically the crypto part if we have Linux on a device we can just write code and see or go that already has the crypto libraries and we can just reuse them instead of writing it ourselves so our focus has really been on making the project not too large making it feasible and hopefully easily usable for other platforms as well I think I covered most of this point we'll get some more of this but I've talked about the line the microcontroller we're using is a Cortex M3 I'll talk a bit about how the write protect works in the flash so it's actually read only code, not writeable code I'll go into more detail about the boot process so how do we actually ensure that nothing interferes with the boot process and it actually only loads our code and then there's the image verification and image loading so this is what our first hack looked like I hope you can see it from the distance so this is a zoom-in of a line board it's approximately a zoom-in of this part of the line board so these soldering joints here are actually pretty small and a very friendly hacker from the Amsterdam Hacker space helped me solder these three wires because these three wires were needed to actually get the device to boot from SPI Nord Flash I gave a small version of this talk half a year ago with the people who made these devices and they listened and now we have a very nice device which has an SPI Nord Flash on there so no longer we need to... we don't want to need any hardware modifications at all so that's nice okay, so the line has a lot of serial lines I think it has 6 or 7 as most all-in or 820 devices do UR0 will be for debugging and we are using UR2 to communicate with the CBM one specific thing I haven't mentioned yet or I glance over it is that we can't have any other storage on the line that is MAND's EMMC or microSD cards we can have SATA the reason for this is that there is some small portion of code fused in all the all-in or 820s that decides where to load from so if you plug in an SD card you're hoping it will load from your SD card before it loads something from MAND because you would have to desolder MAND to get it to not boot from MAND so there's an order in here and I think it might be somewhere in the presentation where some are going to mention now but the point is that it's very hard to protect these types of storage from remote parties to prevent remote parties from writing anything they don't have very nice write protection mechanisms you can mount something as read-only in Linux but that's not very strong you can just remount it as read-write or if you break into the kernel on a different level you can just write to it microSD cards specifically are interestingly complex and they have their own operating system and I think Bunny showed several years ago that you can in fact break into those operating systems and do a lot of weird things there's a link to that blog post at the end of the presentation and the same goes for EMMC and MAND so all our data is instead stored either on USB plugs which is not very reliable solution so we use SATA and have a hard disk or an SSD attached and as I said before the LIME 2 now has support for SPI North Flash I will get to how the write protect on SPI North Flash works in a bit so I explain the part of this when I refer to the small code that is on the LIME that loads the next code from either the microSD card or Flash that's called the B-ROM or the BootROM and in our case the BootROM finds an SPI North Flash chip and then from that SPI North Flash chip it loads something called the SPL which is a simple program loader the reason that we have a simple program loader is because the BootROM is very limited in how much how large a program can be that it loads so it loads a program and a program can handle larger pieces of code and then that program loads U-boot from the SPI Flash so it's just another step to actually get the boot loader loaded and then from U-boot which is our boot loader you can compare it I guess to Grubb as well U-boot will then load the Linux kernel from the SPI North Flash this was one of the tricky parts of the project because there was no support for this at all there are some devices that have support in U-boot to load from SPI North Flash but the A20 didn't have it so Stéphane, one of my colleagues he implemented the U-boot SPI driver for A20 devices for A6040 devices, A32 which is a large range of older devices and the patches I think still somewhere stuck in the main list but they worked really well so somewhere next year they'll probably be merged into U-boot okay so U-boot will then load Linux and the Linux kernel will start up and it will load the introduce your RAM file system which again is a small file system containing say a shell and some other basic program so you can run the script and boot to your real operating system so then the Linux kernel plus the UnitromFast will communicate with the TBM it will say hi I'm the host operating system and I would like you to give me tell me what keys I can trust what certificates are part of those keys go along with those keys I would like you to tell me what the software version was that I last loaded because I have no place to save it and then we will load a verified kernel and images using KXA so again there's a lot of things going on here to verify images to figure out what is the latest image of our operating system can we trust it is it signed by enough parties and then it will be loaded combined with a new kernel so this again is why I'm mentioning KXA here we could have opted for not loading a new kernel but then eventually your kernel gets really out of date and if you change devices only every five or six years that becomes a real nuisance because your kernel is connected to a network and you don't want to do that and of course by the way the reason that we from the host-limes side can't save any files on our we can't save any status because the only other place we can write to is our SATA disk and if we get compromised then somebody can just write to that SATA disk and put there whatever it wants so that's another reason we have the TBM so we can have some form of safe storage so I think this is kind of what I told you before just now but in the graph there's the boot run that loads the simple program loader the simple program loader loads Uboot and Uboot loads the kernel and from there on we can load another kernel and then we're all good to go so all of this code is on a read-only flash chip so none of this can be changed unless you have physical access the same goes for the TBM but it's kind of isolated completely so there's no real risk there okay so what are we actually using in the TBM I'm not going to pronounce the full name of this STM chip but it's an STM32F1 it's an ARM Cortex M3 and the features it has are serial you're going to get with the LIME and the SPI it says possibly but it definitely has SPI because we use it to interface with another flash chip that's on the boot manager and we're specifically using something called LIP Open CM3 and we actually picked the STM32 chips because of this reason because this is a very nice project that has a free library for many of these STM32 microcontrollers and it's actually expanding to other ones as well it's LGPL licensed and it was really great with good documentation that made it very easy to just use GCC and whatever normal tools you're used to do and better work at least we liked it and the program is done using JTAG debuggers with OpenOCD which is the open-on-chip debugger so what you can essentially do is you can just connect your STM32 f1 and then you can just hook GDB to that chip and load your code and debug it of course we need the toolchain to build the whole thing we have documentation at the end of the presentation that basically explains our whole process and has links to these toolchains and as I said the TBM also uses SPI in your flash for data storage so there's another small chip on there to store data we did most of our tests with the STM32 f0 discovery board because when you start out with these things you don't want to start out by designing your own PCB and then figuring out how these microcontrollers work so for many months we just use discovery boards and they work great you can get them from STM one of the more challenging things that we have in the TBM I mean some serial communication is relatively trivial one of the more challenging parts was the file system and the flash translation layer so because we want to store parts because we want to store certificates and keys and some log files and versions on the TBM we need a place to store it and these microcontrollers have very little storage on board so instead we simply decided to put another SPI nor flash chip there because they're again very reliable and pretty cheap you can get them in sizes from 1MB to 16MB and 16MB and that's pretty much the max but they're relatively cheap so stay fun again, work on this project you wrote a file system for this for SPI nor flash including a flash translation layer we tried to find file systems that would just run there's some nice flash file systems in the lambscreen as well but those don't run on a microcontroller unit then you can't just port such a huge file system to a microcontroller they're very resource constrained so stay fun started out by writing the file system and it became very complex because he really needed a flash translation layer to make those mappings a lot easier and at this point it's working quite well we're still working on debugging some parts but it's mostly been pretty stable and this is also included in the source relation if you have a need for this you can just take out just a file system and use it somewhere else this is a picture of our first set of PCBs there's five of them and I'm very happy that you probably can't see some of the bad soldering work we did I mentioned before I'm mostly a software person not a hardware person so we failed soldering at least four microcontrollers and at some point we asked for some help and eventually we managed to get it to work properly this is the version one and version two will be smaller and it will also be easier to hook up other boards this is what it looks like in action so to say so you can simply plug this PCB on top of the line and the battery goes right there at the top but it's not there right now the battery is required to keep time because the line again has no concept of time it can't save the time anywhere in case to save the time where it can't be modified by someone else the TBM can keep the time it's not always required to keep the time but if you're dealing with certificates then it's usually useful to know is this difficult expired or not it depends on your use case you can also not care about that but it's an optional feature of the TBM ok so again a linux and intramfs are on this SPI NOR flash chip and they have full access to the TBM in what we call the trusted stage trusted stage and untrusted stage is very simple in the trusted stage it can essentially do whatever it wants there's probably some limitations like you can't wipe logs or something but it can ask for the time it can read files, it can write files and essentially do pretty much everything so then the lime too will get whatever information it needs verify the image and then load it and then just before it does KXAC it loads the possibly untrusted code which is no longer physically on the device so to say it will tell the TBM I am now moving to something to the untrusted stage which is you can no longer trust me for most of these commands because it might be some remote attacker who compromised the system and then wants to mess with the trusted boot module the trusted boot module is always connected so yeah there's always a serial line that works so it's pretty hard to prevent people from talking with it because they can't mess with it and of course in the whole trusted stage our kernel is very minimal it doesn't have any network capability so there's no attack factor there okay so the untrusted stage is as I said it's pretty simple in this stage the device can do whatever it's supposed to be doing but nothing more so at this point we're connected to the network we might be doing a lot of crypto or there's a chance of people raking in and then the line has almost no access to the TBM it can probably still maybe get the time and it can tell the TBM that it managed the boot successfully which is one of the main things that the TBM really needs to know because otherwise it will just reset the line but yeah I can't mess with the aspect last ship and again of course in the untrusted stage the operating system can load other code it can touch new updates it can restart programs it can download zips or whatever it wants but this is not something we can protect against it's not our goal of the TBM to protect against this what we want to protect against is somebody trying to mess with the next reboot when we forcefully reboot the system again so the most essential part here is that the line can simply tell the trusted boot manager that it's been able to successfully boot okay so I haven't talked a lot about this but I mentioned some basic things so there's one of the features of the TBM is trust management and it can store several keys or certificates and in a future version it will also be able to contain revocation statements of keys if the use case or desire so we're hopefully going to make the code relatively simple but if you want more features you can enable them yeah so this is basically the threshold scheme that I talked about before we will require say three or four out of five keys to be four out of five signatures to be there to actually trust if an image is valid we could store more but and again I'm specifically saying keys here because there might be scenarios where I don't want to deal with time and the category of a certificate is kind of sensitive so you can also deal with keys and not deal with certificates at all but you can also use certificates so you can have a CA and deal with this yeah key revocation could be required in our case we are not going to start with that because it's pretty complex and sometimes even human interaction you want a person to go there and actually change the key so it really depends if your company simply wants to secure his Wi-Fi routers and can just walk over there himself to change any keys so then you don't need any dynamic key management you just load them in there with a program for example there's no perfect trust management system and it really depends on your use case and whatever complexity you need so your requirements are essential in the most simple case one or more keys can be stored in the read-only trusted system so then they would not even need to be stored in the TBM but this is a very simple scenario and these keys are used to verify the images and again you can just require a certain amount of keys there but in such a scenario key revocation is impossible and you can't essentially manage any kind of keys so this is more suitable for someone at home who just wants to secure their machine yeah just the first goal and this is working at this point so this can run on other devices it doesn't just have to run on the line it can run on the Raspberry Pi 3 or other or the Pine 64 or an Orange Pi or any of the other cheap Chinese development boards as long as they can boot from SPI nor Flash and they don't actually load the code before that so you need to have a way to ensure that it only boots from SPI nor Flash so if someone plugs in the Z card that's kind of an issue and especially if there's onboard NAND Flash then you usually can't force it to boot to SPI nor Flash the Raspberry Pi is a nice solution to this where you can simply connect certain pins together that will force it to boot from a certain storage device but most of the others don't have that so the current status serial works on the trusted boot module the real-time plot works and the file system is working so using the serial you can communicate with the file system you can say LS or CAT or write and you can interact with the files the protocol implementation is between trusted boot module and the line work so they are able to talk to each other and communicate and KXX seemed to work and we haven't actually run until a lot of issues yet I'm saying this because it's one of the things I was really afraid of is that if I'm having a Linux kernel from say version 3.0 and I want a boot 4.6 then it might be that they initialize devices very differently and if the old Linux shuts down it doesn't actually shut down certain devices and then when the Linux boots it's a big problem but fortunately this hasn't popped up yet what we also try to do is to boot from KXX to Uboot but that didn't work very well, Uboot tried to initialize the memory again and completely failed so we gave up on that the SPI FlashWriteProtect works but it requires a fork of FlashFirm and FlashFirm is a tool to program mostly Flash devices and Google forked it to add WriteProtect support so the way WriteProtect works in these Flash chips is that they have 8 pins or 16 depending on the size of this chip and if you pull the WriteProtect pin down you will lock the WriteProtect down but that actually doesn't mean that you can't write to the Flash chip it just means that you can no longer change what regions are WriteProtected and what ones are not so this is actually something that took me a day or two to find out so what you're supposed to do is set up a region that's supposed to be WriteProtected then you will say this region can no longer be changed and then you enable the WriteProtect so if you just enable the WriteProtect you can still write to the Flash chip as I said we developed an SPI driver for Uboot for the Eleanor boards and those patches are on the mailing list and the LIME 2 hardware changes are finished so within the next few weeks Olimax will release those new boards and hopefully everyone can play with it and there are other A64 boards which is a different system on chip pool so support has been replaced and finally one other feature that I haven't touched on a lot yet but we seem to have some extra time so I'll touch on that to see how the module can reset the LIME so in our case Hilo said it would be very nice if we can reset such a device daily because if it's been running for a month we can't really know if it's been compromised or not so we need to find the balance between how long would that run and how annoying it is to reboot the device so it could be a day, it could be a week something like this so the TBM is connected to the LIME 2 to a specific pin that will cause the LIME to reset so if the TBM pulls it up then the LIME resets so this is what we use for say daily or weekly reboots and we came up with a mechanism to not just reboot daily but also have the LIME tell the TBM I just want to run for a little longer so hold up for a while and we've even been thinking about a network protocol where we can issue do not reboot signals to those devices so they could fetch something from our website and that's a sign statement with a timestamp in there that says you don't need to reboot yet but in the case of a serious problem where a lot of devices are compromised we can simply not issue do not reboot a signal and then when the LIME is unable to send such a thing to the TBM then the TBM will reset the LIME the issue here however is that this will require some crypto on the TBM and that's something we actually didn't want to do so that's not finished but it is able to reset the LIME so there's a lot of testing to be done still I mean everything seems to work but it might not so we're planning on to test this in the next few weeks and there's some work to be done in the read only trusted system implementation still it can verify basic images but because we're also dealing with reproducible builds figure out what extra metadata we want of those reproducible builds and deal with multiple parties signing the software we've actually spent some time writing user guides and tools for this talk and hope that some people will read it and ask questions afterwards but they're not fully finished so there's quite some information there but if something is not clear then please if you're reading it let us know and in the nearby future we will also provide documentation to use the TBM with other devices and complex trust management is still on the table because we haven't needed it yet and it really kind of depends on the read only trusted system there there's some attack vectors here that I haven't touched on yet but they're all kind of subtle for example if the TBM is power cycled at any point it will forget or not know what state it is in so always go to a trusted state so if somehow the attacker can power cycle the TBM then it can essentially just permanently compromise the system because then it can read files, it can write its own keys or certificates so this is the real issue and right now the TBM is connected to the LIM but in a way that if the LIM would try to pull the power the LIM itself would also reset but this is something that's very subtle and if you're just using this on your own device you should be wary of this we should probably mention that more clearly in the documentation and something I mentioned at the start of the talk there's some permanent boot time exploits that you can imagine again if we're using a file system say X4 and that's on the SATA disk and the attacker figures out how to write his own file system there that when Linux reads it actually overflows and then there's another payload there that then executes while trying to mount the file system we have a real problem because then the really trusted system is compromised another thing that we haven't figured out and it's actually kind of funny is you can't reboot as a LIM right now if you reboot then you don't know what to boot and the TBM won't talk to you because you're still in the untrusted state so this is again where the the LIM where the TBM being able to reboot the LIM comes in was in the previous slide here so the fact that the TBM can reset the LIM is something we can use for rebooting so then the LIM can say well can you reboot me and then move back to the trusted state but we haven't done this in part because we need to make sure that it works the way it's supposed to work and of course bugs in our trust management simple things like key verification or image verification against the key shouldn't be such a big deal but you need to be careful there and that's in part why we're trying to keep it very simple at first place and this is I think from the previous presentation because the TBM does have a concept of time now or at least it can have a concept of time so in this case the TBM can give a valid time to the LIM and because the LIM relies on the TBM in the first place it can assume that the time that the TBM is giving it is sensible so there can be some concept of day and time but if you don't need it then you're just using keys not certificates then you might not even need it and there are some obvious issues with the system but those are I think we can't do anything about it if an attacker logs into the system and we store all our updates on the SATA disk then simply removing all the operating system files from the SATA disk will break the device it can still load the real nature of the system but there's nothing else you can start to the system no longer works but I think this is preferable to a system that's permanently compromised and can steal your data whenever it wants yeah so I touched on the reboot part here I'm really hoping to move to some other devices as well with this project so I've mentioned routers and laptops several times one of my personal favorites will be to have a reproducibly built system that runs with people in the homes of people that runs Tor nodes I'm not sure how familiar everyone is with Tor but I'll give you a very brief introduction so Tor is an under routing network so if you're using Tor to connect you can conceivably hide your location identity to people if you're using it in a clever way but it's a decentralized system so it relies on other people running Tor nodes and right now it's there's quite some people doing it but it could be a lot more people running Tor nodes and you need to keep them up to date to make sure that the network can be compromised so this is pretty difficult so I really hope to take some parts of the work that we're doing here and turn that into reproducibly built Tor routers that can securely update themselves and people can just plug in at home and not worry about it ever and share 20% of the network with the Tor network another open question would be right now our boot image format is very simple so it contains the image, a few signatures and some metadata and we will need to expand that for a reproducible build setup so there's a full chain of trust that you can trace all the way back to the first image you've ever booted as for the license it will be something open we haven't quite figured out what's fitting we are using lip open CM3 so some parts will probably need to be at least LGPL some other parts might be licensed there's a few other things I should really mention I've mentioned reproducible builds a couple of times it was initiated by Dabian but open SUSE is now doing it as well and another distribution that I don't remember right now but this is a really cool website if you want to figure out how reproducible builds work and who's working on it and I think Dabian has been able to reproducibly build at least 94% of their packages so it's really impressive so probably everything you're using daily can be reproducibly built and another really cool project is HADS from Dremel and it's essentially it can work with tails so it's kind of like a boot manager but it works with core boot and it does a lot of cool things to prevent physical compromise to your device as well so we are in our project mostly not caring about physical compromise but if you're interested in this kind of stuff and really preventing hopefully government agencies to mess with your device at all and you should really check out and there was a very cool talk about it at SUSE as well we owe some thanks to various organizations and people and now for funding our project and letting us work on this project I personally owe some thanks to people at my local Hacker Space for explaining to me how some hardware parts work helping me soldering things that I really can't solder Olimax has been very kind in talking with us and figuring out how to fit our user request which is an SPI neuroflash that doesn't require hot gluing and nasty soldering under the already very crowded devices OpenFest for allowing me to give a short version of this talk and of course Shaaf for organizing this awesome camp and letting us give this talk here that went pretty fast you can mail me at this address and you can mail white box systems basically our website you can find contact information there and more things go out to the really awesome Linux SunXI community Allwinner themselves are not very well known for basically handing out GPI license code and helping the community develop proper Linux drivers for it but the Linux SunXI community is basically people from all over the world that have picked up Allwinner's lame source jobs and they fixed it and turned most of the code into proper drivers that are now in Linux so without this community we wouldn't have been able to do this at all with those Allwinner devices and as a result of their work in my opinion those devices are one of the best supported ARM devices ARM development devices that you can get for cheap devices finally some extra resources so we've put up a simple page on opensource.whitebox systems that are now that contains links to the technical documentation and user documentation and has links to the Git repose that's already online right now the read-only trusted state will come online in a few more weeks I think that's it thank you very much so we have some time left for questions two microphones in the room so please in any questions go to the microphone oh wait could you wait open up secure boot software thanks for the plug for heads your motivation for not using a TPM one of the key features that the TPM potentially provides is remote attestation that if this server is talking to other servers to be able to prove to some degree that the software running on the machine is what it says it is is that in scope or is that something that is sort of outside your your threat model are you talking about software that's been running at the system for a long time or just during system startup as you point out it's hard to know most of these things really only assess the system at boot time but when the machine goes to say communicate with an outside server is it desirable to be able to get a something like a quote from the TPM or a TPM hardware to say this is the kernel that has been booted this is the software image that it is running so that you don't have to so that you can trust that it is actually running what you think it is well that would essentially be very useful let me answer that in two parts so I think it would be very useful I'm always afraid that there's always some extra exploiter issue there that the system can't figure out and then we're running these devices for years and years because we think the TPM tells us that everything is working and then it's not and specifically in our case but I think also in the tour case to some degree but more in our case we're dealing with essentially we're firewall for medical health care so we well not a firewall but we share medical data on one on one with parties over TLS connections and we have some form of flash access to certain documents that contain medical like privacy sensitive data so it's it's you have to wait your risks I think the other reason that we didn't just take a TPM is because in my experience but maybe you know a lot better you know a lot more about this it's not that trivial to hook up a TPM to a random system the Chromebooks are very nice because they come with a TPM and Google Wrots offer for them but if you just have a Raspberry Pi or a random development board you can't just plug on a TPM so that was the other reason for trying to figure out how we can write something relatively simple that suits at least a part of our use case and in your current build there's no way to have a secret in the TPM is that correct that it's running completely open source code and the user could potentially a local user could potentially dump or reflash the code in the TPM whoever owns the hardware can of course just take our code and flash whatever user wants on the microcontroller is that what you're asking? yes so that the TPM is closed source that is completely un-reprogramable that closes off that particular vector they're complex devices of course it's still an ARM Cortex so you don't know what it's exactly doing but it's likely that hopefully there's not a huge vector in there not saying that the TPMs have huge vectors but it could be part of your threat model thank you for the question any other questions then I would like to thank Malijn and Guido for their thought


Okay, so I'm actually looking at interdisciplinary collaborations as such, which perfectly fits with the day, and I spent some time working on the ideas and give you a bit of a background how I entered the algorithm and what it is that we're looking at, or I'm looking at. What does it lead to in terms of questions maybe for the future? So very quickly, when I was looking for a job at the same time, Stratford University got something that translates to about 1.2 million New Zealand dollars for three years to spend on facilitating interdisciplinary research, which is great. Loads of money, three years, let's do it. Till somebody who later employed me asked them a critical question, what do we mean and what do we want to actually achieve? Quite a few people in a spot when they thought, we don't know, now what? This is where my job was created at that time and PhD that came out of it. I spent about 20 months researching but also assisting the board, following different groups of people doing interdisciplinary research, different initiatives, tweaking, poking, changing, trying to learn what it is and what actually matters in the long term. But also, of course, to supply some data for the board that could then show to the founder that, yes, we achieved, we facilitated it. Whatever it was that we were to facilitate. And that led us to the first question, what and how do we define interdisciplinary or disciplines? It's a bit of a background, I took a perspective that comes originally from sociology, the practice perspective. In the crudest possible way, and I hope nobody from the field is here who could later tell me what I've done, practice really explains what legitimate in terms who we are, what we do, but also how we learn, all about situated learning, relational learning and being part of a community of practice. So this is the crudest way to explain the perspective, but that also means it gives us a very neat and nice way to explain the disciplines, first of all. There are communities, there are tribes, a bit like cultures that fight with each other quite often, languages, systems of values, the way you approach things, the way you do things for the reason you do them, the things that are legitimate in your discipline, basically define who you are as a scientist or researcher, but that also means or leads to the point that communities are quite often incongruent, different methodologies, different languages, different systems of values don't go together, which led us to another question, I'm almost stealing the idea of question, which leads you to another question, to another question, what is it then in terms of interdisciplinary, it doesn't mean there is another practice that can be termed as interdisciplinary, and if so, what is it? Fortunately the answer was, or at least we think yes, and we ended up with summarizing and describing some of the practices and interdisciplinary as actually a set of complex practices that stuck on each other. We grouped them at that time for a practices inquiry, engagement and enactment as a number of different ways to group them of course, I'm not saying this is the only way to think about it, and some interesting examples would be, for example, upframing, and Alan's presentation was a perfect example of that, the way he presented was very engaging for everyone, it didn't matter which discipline you came from. The same for the problem, so one of the best examples we had was a NASA guy comes to one of the workshop and instead of saying, we need to transport 50 Marines from base A to base B and it needs to be done, blah blah blah, he just said any ideas that can help us to get a number of people from A to B and we got musicians coming into this session, because they thought they've got a solution and they had some good ideas. The other one which is really interesting and we saw with some established professors was asking stupid questions, sitting there knowing the answer but just clarifying for others, and you probably all know that pain from the lecture room, Jesus this lies out terrible, I can't see anyone. When students don't get it but don't ask a question, but we do the same and the bigger the ego of the professor, more often they didn't ask the questions. I'm not gonna show, I don't know. Those were the practices that they were developing, us, we talked, or we worked with the groups and we started writing about them. The second interesting idea that came out of it is the emergence of community, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary communities. This guy started working across boundaries, knowing each other, connecting to each other. There was also a shift in the way we started thinking about and the university about interdisciplinary research. Is it about solving a particular problem when we can gather disciplines and scientists solve the problem, go back home? Or is it about longevity? Was the project about achieving long-term collaborations? Not necessarily one problem but thinking in interdisciplinary ways. Different types of support, different type of initiatives. Is it about borrowing or co-creating? Do I take your idea and just apply it or do we actually sit down and spend long, long time trying to develop something together? Some interesting implications, I'm gonna only give a few examples. Less money was better. The more money we put on the table for initiative out of the 600,000 pounds, the worse the group was. It attracted some of people who were not really interested in collaboration but money. Less money was better for nurturing, spending time up front, putting different table of resource when people could glue. We also had a lot of dating, speed dating, and we called it pre-marriage dating when we spent time with groups making sure they clicked. And they developed the practices so we know they're not gonna follow apart halfway through or they're not connected for three years like bad marriage. That's the project. Side effect, we developed a number of reviewers and champions for the disciplines. So they were then reviewing the different projects because they knew how to approach it. Disciplinary OID are experts, but we're in the same. It wasn't the star scientist quite often who would engage. It was somebody else who probably wasn't as accomplished as his colleagues in the department. It was much better at translating the knowledge and bringing different strings. Implications, promotion. So university changed at some point the way they did APR and enabled them to get promoted because it's still the question, what do you do in the global discipline itself? Finally, we developed a number of courses which are still going. So PhD level course, 10 credits, which we run for three days with all the scientists just talking through and explaining what practices are and stressing some of the reflexivity. I will just finish here because the time is up, but there are still questions that come and ideas that could be explored and one of them we just started talking about is the space for a board game to actually teach and engage students to get to the problems and cover an idea. Thank you.