111–120 of 172 posts
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There are two meaningful options for CPU. If they both adopt the tech...
... they create a niche for a third ... provided there are enough people who care. If nobody cares nobody cares.
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.
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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…
Why does MS full disk encryption require TPM?
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.
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…
Which is precisely what you would want if you were building a DRM scheme - you just aren't being imaginative enough. It's always important to keep in mind that bad actors are typically just as smart and capable as you are.
User hostile practices across the board benefit greatly from the ability to attest to the precise combination of binaries that were booted. Locked down devices are built upon that foundation - no custom ROMs, no jailbreaks, walled garden app stores, and DRM.
Unfortunately, those capabilities are a fundamental building block for securing devices in general. The same technology that can be used by an abusive manufacturer, publisher, or government to secure a device against the user can also be used by the user to secure the device against others. The key difference is in who holds the keys for the root of trust.
(To that end, some modern secure boot implementations manage to get this bit right by allowing you to specify your own set of public keys before locking down the UEFI interface with a password.)
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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.
The Intel ME and AMD PSP, on the other hand, are proper nightmares. For that matter, so is any other "security co-processor" that operates as an unauditable black box below ring 0 (presumably this applies to both Apple's and Google's solutions).
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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, s…
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.
You can't forget Java with UTF-16. I feel like Java is an even bigger culprit since the whole language assumes it and there are no real alternatives.