Servury Blackbox zero-knowledge VPS - Encrypted RAM, Encrypted disk and no guest agent - from 9.99$

servury · August 24

@forest said: I am curious how you'll handle the influx of bad actors as others have pointed out. Do you have experience with it? I don't want the MJJs and phishers to catch you off-guard!

Believe me, I have experience with it. Given our positioning, a lot of people initially think Servury is bulletproof hosting, so I'm already constantly dealing with abuse reports.

@forest said: Nice reduction of attack surface! I'm curious, do you also perform other hardening measures for QEMU?

Here's our defaults at the moment :

-nodefaults
-cpu 'EPYC-v4,enforce,+kvm_pv_eoi,+kvm_pv_unhalt,vendor=AuthenticAMD'
-object 'rng-random,filename=/dev/urandom,id=rng0'
-device 'virtio-rng-pci,rng=rng0,max-bytes=1024,period=1000'
-device 'i6300esb,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4'
-watchdog-action reset
-global 'ICH9-LPC.disable_s3=1'
-global 'ICH9-LPC.disable_s4=1'
-sandbox 'on,obsolete=deny'

I'll tinker around with yours, but I think some of them might break Proxmox, not sure though, have to test.

@forest said: If you don't mind, could you post the output of lshw; lspci -v; lsmod; taskset -c 0 cpuid -1r from a guest?

https://servury.com/guest.txt

@forest said: On the non-pro tier, would it be possible to run a Tor exit if all abuse reports are forwarded to the customer and the customer handles them within 24 hours?

Not sure, I'd have to implement it first, and we would have to test drive it thoroughly. It'd be a nightmare to manage abuse that way.

@forest said: I actually wrote a guide here describing how to make the guest agent safer. If you ever end up needing features that could only be done via the guest agent like getting usage stats for the VM dashboard, you can whitelist the guest agent RPC commands so that it won't execute any dangerous ones.

OK. I will 100% be giving that a read, but part of me really likes the nuclear-no-guest-agent-at-all option. It completely kills any possibility of fuckery happening because of the guest agent.

@forest said: While this is ostensibly true, it is theoretically possible for you, with physical access, to bypass AMD SEV-SNP even using off-the-shelf hardware, although it takes some expertise and isn't trivial: https://tee.fail

Yeah this is kinda fucked to be honest, there's not much we can do to guarantee we're not doing that I reckon.

servury · August 24

@TimboJones said:

@forest said:
This is awesome! I'm very happy to see a new privacy-first provider, especially one that goes farther than merely "we take crypto and don't ask for KYC". I am curious how you'll handle the influx of bad actors as others have pointed out. Do you have experience with it? I don't want the MJJs and phishers to catch you off-guard!

Yeah, burn out from bad customers having his cell phone number is a recipe for disaster.

It's kind of my job to deal with that, we'll see how it goes though.

servury · August 24

@Obelous said:

@TimboJones said: He doesn't have much gear at this point. It's a shared box, so they'll take the drive and maybe they start taking servers due to TPM's.

He has a shit ton of nodes listed on his status page but it smells very fake. https://servury.com/status

I am very suspicious.

Yeah, those are not Blackbox nodes. Those are nodes for our regular VPS/VDS. We do not own that hardware.

Obelous · August 24

@servury said:

@Obelous said:

@TimboJones said: He doesn't have much gear at this point. It's a shared box, so they'll take the drive and maybe they start taking servers due to TPM's.

He has a shit ton of nodes listed on his status page but it smells very fake. https://servury.com/status

I am very suspicious.

Yeah, those are not Blackbox nodes. Those are nodes for our regular VPS/VDS. We do not own that hardware.

I don't really believe they're real at all. 200+ nodes in 6 months of doing business?

And I wasn't able to find anything pointing to you having that many nodes or those other locations. I can only find that 1 LG for Montreal, all your infra hosted in Montreal. DNS, Censys data, etc... also only pointing to Montreal.

Trustpilot doesn't really point to you having customers either, there's 3 reviews. You had more than 20 until Trustpilot removed all your fake 5-star reviews. https://www.trustpilot.com/review/servury.com https://web.archive.org/web/20260115143659/https://www.trustpilot.com/review/servury.com

Everything combined, it just starts smelling like shit.

cloromorpho · August 24

The jig is up buddy

forest · August 25

@servury said: Here's our defaults at the moment :

No -run-with user=qemu? Or is it being started as non-root?

luckypenguin · August 25

Nice for the non-KYC and SEV-SNP part, but your other 2 marketing "addons" are possible
with any provider. You can install your own image with disk encryption, and having the guest agent installed or alternatively blacklist it's dangerous features is entirely up to you.
9.99$/mo price is very hard to justify for only 512 MB ram, let's be honest, it's barely
enough to run just the basic OS services with this low amount.
39.99$ is a price for a reasonably ok'ish dedi, you only offer 4GB ram VPS for that.
GLWS.

servury · August 25

@forest said:

@servury said: Here's our defaults at the moment :

No -run-with user=qemu? Or is it being started as non-root?

Here's the results of my tests so far

Flag Result
resourcecontrol=deny works
elevateprivileges=deny blocks setsid(), -daemonize needs it
spawn=deny could not launch network script pve-bridge: Operation not permitted
-run-with user= starts, then leaks tap devices on shutdown

I guess the only way to get around to using your - might I say, really nice hardening flags - would be to make our own QEMU API/wrapper and ditch proxmox entirely. That's now on the roadmap.

forest · August 25

@servury said: -run-with user= starts, then leaks tap devices on shutdown

So all your QEMU processes are running as root? If so, what is the purpose of even having the sandbox?

servury · August 27

`> @forest said:

@servury said: -run-with user= starts, then leaks tap devices on shutdown

So all your QEMU processes are running as root? If so, what is the purpose of even having the sandbox?

It can't be done on Proxmox. I'll make a POC of a custom QEMU wrapper so it can be done.

forest · August 27

@servury said: It can't be done on Proxmox.

Wait... so Proxmox still runs VMs as root by default?

luckypenguin · August 27

@forest said: Wait... so Proxmox still runs VMs as root by default?

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Qemu/KVM_Virtual_Machines

QEMU inside Proxmox VE runs as a root process, since this is required to access block and PCI devices.

Totally possible to harden it properly. Don't pass raw disks to guest VMs, and only pass virtio-net as network device since it acts as a buffer. The problem will be with PCI devices like GPUs, but that's rare to have GPUs in shared VM environments anyway so can be ignored.

forest · August 27

@luckypenguin said: Totally possible to harden it properly. Don't pass raw disks to guest VMs, and only pass virtio-net as network device since it acts as a buffer. The problem will be with PCI devices like GPUs, but that's rare to have GPUs in shared VM environments anyway so can be ignored.

Even with that, you can drop privileges after it uses the raw disks with e.g. VFIO.

luckypenguin · August 27

@forest said: Even with that, you can drop privileges after it uses the raw disks with e.g. VFIO.

Yeah but Proxmox entire development logic is tied around running as root. The architectural design blocks priv-dropping workarounds. ZFS, Ceph, LVM, NFS, HA, I can probably think of more. This is a too much complex over-engineered product that I think was never designed for isolated, untrusted guests sharing the same host. While it's ok in corporate setups where you don't expect guest VMs tampering with each other or the host, it has so many attack surfaces that are only waiting to be discovered.

neighhouse · August 27

Hello NSA

Marx07 · August 27

Are xmr / Tor nodes allowed?
Or Public vpns?

servury · August 28

@Marx07 said:
Are xmr / Tor nodes allowed?
Or Public vpns?

Yes, all of those are allowed on the Blackbox Pro plan

forest · August 29

@luckypenguin said: QEMU inside Proxmox VE runs as a root process, since this is required to access block and PCI devices.

@servury Note that this means that the sandboxing options you provided are useless. Nothing is stopping a compromised QEMU process from obtaining kernelmode (which is the whole purpose of a seccomp sandbox).

servury · August 29

@forest said:

@luckypenguin said: QEMU inside Proxmox VE runs as a root process, since this is required to access block and PCI devices.

@servury Note that this means that the sandboxing options you provided are useless. Nothing is stopping a compromised QEMU process from obtaining kernelmode (which is the whole purpose of a seccomp sandbox).

I'm fully aware. Like I said, I'm working on a custom QEMU wrapper to ditch Proxmox entirely, which will subsequently allow us to use hardcore turbo schizo hardening methods. Should be done by the end of next week

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