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“Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

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Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#91

Post by Cullinet »

GeekyBear wrote: post #86
qayxc wrote: post #60

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…

> Consoles aren't general computing devices, though. Consoles are absolutely general computing devices. Microsoft just uses DRM to prevent you from running non approved software.

Indeed :

David Cutler was called back from retirement to get Windows 10 booting on the Xbox One X.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#93

Post by zinekeller »

xvilka wrote: post #78

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.

> UTF-16 (everyone except them and JavaScript uses UTF-8)

It's like blaming America's analogue colour TV implementation (NTSC) when in fact PAL and SECAM haven't been invented yet (and NTSC is partially responsible for PAL even existing).

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#94

Post by dleslie »

p1necone wrote: post #74
api wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User experience is everything, and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. I've been yelling about that for years and years and very few people seem to get it. Free as in freedom got conflated with free as in beer y…

There's a lot of open source software that provides a fantastic user experience to developers , perhaps the solution is somehow getting some users to work on your open source product when developers aren't your intended users.

Even as a developer the things I want just don't work reliably:

1. Bluetooth; Audio especially, but all BT is flaky.

2. Low Latency audio; I have tried Jack on numerous machines and always find myself staring at high latency buffers because the kernel audio driver can't perform any better, and then there's how often it just ... goes silent without any trace in the logs.

3. Suspend and battery usage are, in general, still a decade behind the competition.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#95

Post by heavyset_go »

azalemeth wrote: post #9

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…

Stallman[1] and others[2] have talked about just this problem for over a decade now.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#96

Post by anfilt »

qayxc wrote: post #82
Dylan16807 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> 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 pr…

Its fine to say dont buy such hardware. The concern is what happens if thats all AMD, Intel and qualcomm sell to people. Apple already does this with the iPhones and tablets, and unless you find a bootrom exploit good luck running an other OS on the device.

You also start running into problems where more software and content may require such hardware.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#97

Post by beauzero »

bitL wrote: post #52
azalemeth wrote: post #9

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…

Boiling frog stuff... We complained about this 20 years ago, all these moves were known back then, yet here we are. More to come - TPM required to connect to the Internet and access news sources without any ability to store information on our own devices. Followed by rewriting historical articles to properly "sanitize" content.

It's Fahrenheit 451 without actually having to burn the books. Commerce will turn them into toilet paper and soon there are no original works. Just digital content that can be changed to meet the narrative at the moment. Interesting times.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#98

Post by mjg59 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #69
qayxc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how that works. At all.

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.

Pluton can securely track what software was booted on the main core as long as the previous component in the boot chain participates. If your OS doesn't participate, you don't get any measurements beyond that point. And that means there's no way for Pluton to block execution.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#99

Post by baby »

kmeisthax wrote: post #62
azalemeth wrote: post #9

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…

I see Pluton more as a "competitor" to Apple's Secure Enclave Processor and Google's Titan chip, and getting rid of the nightmare that TPM was/is.

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

#100

Post by whereistimbo »

xvilka wrote: post #78

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.

UEFI originated from EFI which was first developed by Intel for use in Itanium platform. EFI saw widespread use on consumer devices pioneered by Apple on Intel Macs. I don't know how far Microsoft influence on EFI, because even Apple was responsible for widespread use of EFI on consumer devices.
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