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I worked extensively with Pluton when I was employed on Azure Sphere (an IoT platform marketed as highly secure and composed of a linux-based OS, ARM SoC, and cloud service). I might be able to answer questions about this. Here’s a blog by the engineer lead on Azure Sphere that discusses Pluton: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/anatomy-of-a-secured-... Disclaimer: I still work at MSFT but in a different org.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's not something I want in my general-purpose computing device where I am the owner. Consoles aren't general computing devices, though. Apple disagrees with your idea of ownership, too ;) and so do the customers who Pluton is targeted at - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/windows10... The whole project isn't targeted at end-users. It's IoT, businesses, hospitals, government agencies, utility c…
> The whole project isn't targeted at end-users. It's IoT, businesses, hospitals, government agencies, utility companies, etc. > It's the security needs of these organisations that are addressed by this technology, not yours, not mine. It's perfectly fine to let a sysadmin lock down a computer to reduce what the end user can do. None of these use cases or security benefits require taking power away from the sysadmin.…
Yes, they do! That's the whole point of the product. Why would you even trust the sysadmin in the first place? The fact of the matter is that a lot of data leaks have been caused by insiders - either willingly or via social engineering.
This technology provides a method of closing this loophole and aims to enable users (not private people) to have a secure domain that not even someone with physical access to the system and all administrative privileges has access to.
Whether it works as advertised is another story of course, but the gist of it is that no one is to be trusted; especially not the sysadmin.
> With the obvious note that lots of home users are their own sysadmins.
Again - this is not primarily targeted at home users. Plus the vast majority of home users don't even know what administrating a system even means. And TBH - why should they? "It just works!" has been a very successful mantra for this one company what sells iPods and such... This might be hard to grasp for some greybeards, but hardware security by design is worth more than security cameras, NDAs, background checks and good work ethics.
> But if I'm forced to give someone else special beyond-root access to my device for DRM purposes, that's not acceptable.
And that's fine and you are free to not use these products then because they're not made for you anyway. This is not consumer level hardware (at least not yet).
I wonder if it will be one of the inferior technologies that were forced by Microsoft even outside of their Windows world. Like it happened with UEFI (that has no multithreading, uses PE as a format, Microsoft C ugly coding convention, bloated), SecureBoot (that was designed to stop anything non-Windows instead of real security), UTF-16 (everyone except them and JavaScript uses UTF-8), and so on. The list is long.
Call me sceptical, but I hope m$ is not pulling Apple tricks to lock computers to their OS. Is this open source? Will consumer be able to audit it down to the silicon level?
They already said it is OS agnostic. MS 2020 is far away from MS 2010. With regards to the auditing need, can you audit a CPU down to the silicon level today?
I'm reminded of Christopher Domas' excellent talk/s on finding undocumented X86 instructions, if there are any backdoors in a modern processor they'll probably under some hyper-obscure (register, stack etc.) state even if they did use an undocumented instruction.
A previous HN link is here -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131431 -- which links to MS's original press release -- https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-... . That article explicitly states that it was designed originally for the xbox. I worry that going to be a very anti-consumer, anti-free-speech, DRM heavy chip that MS want to popularise as an alternative to the (still hated in some…
> Why else would they design it for the xbox, of all things? If you really want to know the answer, here's the lead engineer explaining it en detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0
If the user attempts to modify the system, it will brick itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He says in pretty much literally the opening sentence that it's for DRM: "we want to prevent the piracy of games", and then goes on to justify that their business model involves making a loss on each xbox sold, and wants to ensure that the CPU only runs Microsoft code against the wishes of the Xbox owner. A later direct quote is "the fundamental difference between Windows security and Xbox security is that the owner…
> That's not something I want in my general-purpose computing device where I am the owner. Consoles aren't general computing devices, though. Apple disagrees with your idea of ownership, too ;) and so do the customers who Pluton is targeted at - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/windows10... The whole project isn't targeted at end-users. It's IoT, businesses, hospitals, government agencies, utility c…
Consoles are absolutely general computing devices. Microsoft just uses DRM to prevent you from running non approved software.
A previous HN link is here -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131431 -- which links to MS's original press release -- https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-... . That article explicitly states that it was designed originally for the xbox. I worry that going to be a very anti-consumer, anti-free-speech, DRM heavy chip that MS want to popularise as an alternative to the (still hated in some…
So, the Trusted Platform Module itself isn't a DRM solution. It's a chip that hangs off the LPC/ISA bus and holds a crypto key generated from boot stage hashes that your BIOS, bootloader, and operating system provide to it. The idea is that all of those hashes together form a key that would change if any stage were tampered with, and that by encrypting things with the key you can prove that those particular things ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another commenter familiar with the tech said: Pluton can securely track what software was booted on the main core (called "measure boot") and it basically sends a hash of that to the cloud to prove to the cloud what software is currently running. That sounds like most of what you need to build a system that can enforce what executables you're allowed to load and prevent you from attaching a debugger.
You omitted the context there: the poster was talking about Azure Sphere - IoT devices that use Pluton for verification with remote services. That's a different use case (chip-to-cloud). It can also not prevent you from attaching a debugger when all you need to do is to go offline. In fact, the whole point is that you can run anything without compromising the security of the data in the secure enclave. That's what Ze…
If it goes into client chips, and someone uses it for DRM, that's awful.
I guess we'll see?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why else would they design it for the xbox, of all things? If you really want to know the answer, here's the lead engineer explaining it en detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0
He says in pretty much literally the opening sentence that it's for DRM: "we want to prevent the piracy of games", and then goes on to justify that their business model involves making a loss on each xbox sold, and wants to ensure that the CPU only runs Microsoft code against the wishes of the Xbox owner. A later direct quote is "the fundamental difference between Windows security and Xbox security is that the owner…
That's an amazing quote that should be preserved for posterity. ;-)