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The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

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Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#61

Post by aplanas »

userbinator wrote: post #11

What is to prevent school WiFi from one day requiring a Pluton assertion that your Windows PC hasn’t been tampered with before you can join the network? Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Sta…

Windows security models and policies are the enemy, not remote attestation (RA).

RA is a technology that has its fair use, and can be desired for other systems, like in Linux. With a pure RA system your services can decide to trust or not those devices on your network that can be compromised, and report to other devices that there is something suspicious.

As anything, this can be used properly to increase the security of your edge architecture, or wrongly to limit the users actions.

Let me put another example. With RA I should be able to authorize validated systems in my R&D VPN. If you are using your own laptop with the company certificate, and the verifier tag the systems as "unknown" or "unhealthy", it will not allow the access to the internal network, but sure you can still use your laptop for anything else. This, IMHO, is a fair use of this technology.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#62

Post by peter_retief »

mordae wrote: post #57
peter_retief wrote: post #36

Microsoft are trying to enforce a monopoly on hardware, where is the https://www.sec.gov/ on this?

This. M$ is literally trying to wall off the PC.

That is "exactly" what they are trying to do, I find it sad that people are prepared to accept this as business as usual, considering the efforts made to make Linux available to everyone.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#63

Post by BiteCode_dev »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #59
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations…

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months . Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades.

Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator.

In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time.

> Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#64

Post by sofixa »

uw_rob wrote: post #38
pmontra wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this turns into security theater because ultimately they can't trust those third parties too.

When it comes to security someone must always sleep with one eye open - co-owning this responsibility is totally reasonable. Microsoft takes security seriously and is investing heavily in it; if they are already in your orgs trust boundaries I see no reason why they wouldn't be considered good stewards for this as well. Besides, at enterprise scale, how do you trust internal teams? It could all be security theater an…

> Microsoft takes security seriously and is investing heavily in it

Some parts of it maybe do. Some others, like multiple different Azure teams, don't even think about anything resembling security, or there wouldn't have been multiple critical and trivially exploitable security vulnerabilities on Azure in the last year only. (If you don't know them, please read up on them. Security is hard, but in those cases nobody even pretended to try!)

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#65

Post by sascha_sl »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #59
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations…

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months . Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

Technologists often have such tunnel vision that limits their concerns to tyranny driven by technology when there's plenty of low tech attacks on open society all the time.

It reminds me of the good old "my password takes 2 billion years to crack, but my kneecaps only take a few seconds" metaphor about people in tech forgetting that physical coercion is, in fact, a possible attack vector for your IT security.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#66

Post by __void »

nowadays 98% of things implying "security" are actually unwanted products, protections for "the other side" or trivial distortions of reality where, conveyed by "security" itself, the user himself becomes the product

- no, I don't need protections for the side channel, I never asked for them

- no, I don't need a unique identifier, who is the demented person who asked you for it

- no, I am not going to glitch the power supply, and even if I did it means I am interested in doing it and wish it worked instead I was prevented from doing it

- no, I don't care at all about having a hw store for certificates, which are ephemeral and dropped from above anyway so what am I supposed to trust?

- and so on

"not secure by design" nowadays comes close to being a coveted feature

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#67

Post by sofixa »

intelVISA wrote: post #34
Analemma_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conspiratorial answers here are emotionally satisfying, but ultimately wrong. The reason chip makers and OS vendors are adding this is customer demand, by which I mean enterprises. Companies want remote attestation and guaranteed-immutable OS images on their networks, and I honestly can't say I blame them. In a perfect world they could have it and we could somehow firewall it away from the consumer space entirely…

I don't really care for the reason, why can't we as consumers opt out if it's consumer oriented then? For me it's not even about the egregious security and privacy implications -- I just simply want the (illusion of) choice w/r/t silicon rootkit 'features' that I'll never use.

You can, it even says in the article that Lenovo and Dell are shipping with the Pluton chips disabled by default. If they can do it, a user can disable it to (for now at least).

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#68

Post by aaronbrethorst »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #63
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months . Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades. Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator. In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time. > Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie…

And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill most marican native with blades

To be pedantic, it was diseases and outright, explicit murder. (which is not an excuse. Biological warfare is a modern war crime, after all.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno...

banking on the wolf to behave in the hen [house] this time

Fair point, but the United States is rapidly moving towards authoritarian governance right now. There are steps that every U.S. citizen who reads my comment can take to help stop this decline immediately. I don't like the idea of this sort of TPM 3.0 module in my computer's hardware, but it's a 'day after tomorrow' problem for me, not a 'right now' problem.

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#69

Post by aaronbrethorst »

sascha_sl wrote: post #65
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months . Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

Technologists often have such tunnel vision that limits their concerns to tyranny driven by technology when there's plenty of low tech attacks on open society all the time. It reminds me of the good old "my password takes 2 billion years to crack, but my kneecaps only take a few seconds" metaphor about people in tech forgetting that physical coercion is, in fact, a possible attack vector for your IT security.

Indeed, the XKCD $5 wrench attack vector. https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

#70

Post by password1 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #52
Gh0stRAT wrote: post #46

I'm completely missing how his example of a Word document that can only be opened by approved users on approved hardware within the corporation is supposed to be a bad thing. Honestly, that sounds pretty fantastic. I've been using 3rd party tools/extensions to do this sort of thing in corporate and government environments for years, but having the attestation go all the way down to the hardware level is a big value-a…

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations…

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