This was a wild ride, what an adventure. So many moving pieces, this really is just one big house of cards.
I definitely posted this on the wrong thread, I am sorry
Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
691–700 of 799 posts
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#692The superhuman efforts that folks on HN make to find technical workarounds and solutions is wonderful to see, but we must realize that this is not a technical problem. It's a social and legislative one. It can't be fought on technical grounds. The push back has to be via putting pressure on politicians by making regular people more aware. Right now, the vast majority of users are being bombarded with a one sided narr…
> In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged. I've had a lengthy debate about this (in the context of right-to-repair) with a friend of mine who's outside tech and he genuinely held (still holds?) the opinion that the manufacturer has the "right" to decide how their products are used. I'm willing to bet that this is a…
I mean I agree with you. But also, it's not that unreasonable of an opinion. As long as it's coupled with optionality, which I think is the actual issue. Well the actual "issue" is that most people don't care or think that much at all about it. HN is a very special crowd.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged. Apple already does this and practically no one is outraged
Apple is the classic “good king”. By and large they have used their power in ways that benefit users. Other than enriching apple, there’s been no direct or apparent harm to the end user from the walled garden. I know that is a controversial point, but harms we don’t ever know about are pretty hard to get upset about. But the “good” king never lasts. They’re always eventually replaced by a despot, and all the power yo…
Please explain what makes them good? They make a better product than most, but they also charge more than most. That's just a business model.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird rant. TPMs are great. The modern computing landscape needs a safe place to put secrets. It's what made the iPhone (Secure Enclave is effectively a TPM) years ahead of Android in terms of security. The problem isn't the TPM, but attestation. As soon as the TPM is required to not be under your control to get access to Y, bad things happen. Hell, in actuality, the problem isn't even attestation, its policy. The EU…
Requiring "tokens" stored in "trusted modules" and 7-factor-auth for everything is not progress, it's theater. The biggest achievement of the security orthodoxy was locking me out of my email, by requiring me to read a code sent to my email to log into my email. I -- literally -- do not care about a single "account" in any "service" I use aside from my email and bank account. Most people would add a few social media…
Your accounts are valuable, even if they're not valuable to you.
An old account with typical activity patterns can be extended some level of trust. If you sign up for an email address and immediately send a message with 100 recipients in CC, you're probably a spammer, so you get blocked. If you've used the account for years, ehh it's probably invitations to your high-school reunion or a donation drive for your Church, let's let this one through.
You can only extend this level of trust if you prevent your gullible users from constantly getting hacked; 2FA is one way to do that.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
Passkeys are better passwords. They need a TPM.
> Passkeys are better passwords. They need a TPM. Passkeys absolutely do not need TPM. You can get passkey support in any browser with a simple 1password plugin without any TPM hardware. The same way you could get a TOTP app on your phone without any TPM. TPMs are just an extra security layer for most usages. They are mainly a necessity for some shady business like DRMs.
TPMS give you the convenience of short passwords (or no passwords) and the security of long keys.
A chip which you can write to and interact with but can't read is valuable; it lets you enforce conditions which you otherwise couldn't. For example, you can protect your sensitive data with a 6-digit pin, secure in the knowledge that the chip will erase the encryption key after 10 failed attempts. If you had full access to the TPM storage, you could brute force that PIN in seconds.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is the classic “good king”. By and large they have used their power in ways that benefit users. Other than enriching apple, there’s been no direct or apparent harm to the end user from the walled garden. I know that is a controversial point, but harms we don’t ever know about are pretty hard to get upset about. But the “good” king never lasts. They’re always eventually replaced by a despot, and all the power yo…
Please explain what makes them good? They make a better product than most, but they also charge more than most. That's just a business model.
For one thing, Apple has tended to focus on privacy at the expense of profit. Apple could certainly be monetizing all of their user data. Now more than ever. It's not just businesses that want your data to sell you stuff, it's the hyperscalers wanting to funnel it into AI training.
Apple is not perfect, by any means. I recently had a conversation with a former Apple employee about how they employ differential privacy internally. This former employee was upset about Apple's interpretation of one parameter ("privacy budget"), but the fact that we're having this conversation at all is a positive. Google, despite being an early adopter of differential privacy, is on the other side of the privacy spectrum: virtually everything they provide is intended to capture what you do on- or off-line.
I will pay a premium for Apple stuff for this, and other reasons. I do wish they were more developer-friendly, however. Enough so that every time I buy a new computer I have to run through the mental calculus of whether I'd rather fight with the cathedral or the bazaar. I recently bought a new computer and the cathedral won the last round.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#697Requiring authorized silicon (and software) isn't even the biggest problem here. They do not use zero knowledge proof systems or blind signatures. So every time you use your device to attest you leave behind something (the attestation packet) that can be used to link the action to your device. They put on a show about how much they care about your privacy by introducing indirection into the process (static device 'ID…
Ultimately, the point of hardware attestation isn't to ensure that your device is trusted, but that the action you're trying to perform was done by a human, not a bot doing millions of them per second. It's just another CAPTCHA mechanism in disguise, required because bots have gotten so good at solving the existing ones. With a secure device, the only way to get an attestation for an account signup is to do the signu…
> Ultimately, the point of hardware attestation isn't to ensure that your device is trusted, but that the action you're trying to perform was done by a human, not a bot doing millions of them per second. It's just another CAPTCHA mechanism in disguise, required because bots have gotten so good at solving the existing ones.
...no? Maybe this is true of end-user device attestation. But there are other use-cases for attestation.
Server device attestation is an entirely different thing. It's used in e.g. IaaS "Confidential VM" offerings, where the audience for the attestation information is the customer, rather than the server host. It's a very pro-privacy / pro-data-sovereignty feature.
And while embedded device attestation is sometimes about preventing customers from tampering with IoT stuff you "sold" them, more often it's about being able to trust and confidently assert that e.g. the climate sensors you've deployed all over a forest as part of a research project haven't been fucked with to report false data by someone with an agenda. (Or to "apply denial" to your unmanned military satellite downlink station the moment you detect that there's some unknown person out there futzing with it.)
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged. Apple already does this and practically no one is outraged
Apple is the classic “good king”. By and large they have used their power in ways that benefit users. Other than enriching apple, there’s been no direct or apparent harm to the end user from the walled garden. I know that is a controversial point, but harms we don’t ever know about are pretty hard to get upset about. But the “good” king never lasts. They’re always eventually replaced by a despot, and all the power yo…
Their business model revolves around people to choose to pay them for products, which aligns them with customer interests on a fundamental level. They have to work within those constraints when they engage in lock-in chicanery
Most of the other big tech companies make their revenue from other companies paying them to leverage the influence they have over their users. So they are not constrained in the same way.
I believe that most Googlers are pretty aligned with the principles of the HN crowd, but Google the machine is not.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably not going to happen for a very long time. Relatively simple SoCs already do tons of work before the architectural reset vector in undocumented boot ROMs in order to assist the reset process. There's also tons of value in a boot ROM that can't be accidentally erased to add low level DFU routines.
Having DFU in BootROM is good. Having "secure boot" with only the vendor keys in BootROM is evil.
Most of the time the root of trust isn't in the boot rom, but instead OTP fuses that the boot rom reads.
Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged. I've had a lengthy debate about this (in the context of right-to-repair) with a friend of mine who's outside tech and he genuinely held (still holds?) the opinion that the manufacturer has the "right" to decide how their products are used. I'm willing to bet that this is a…
> 'm willing to bet that this is a common viewpoint of people outside the tech sphere, they just want a device that "works", which for them is essentially just "I can use apps from the App store". Perhaps some people were just conditioned to believe that these shackles are forced upon them for their own good, because only bad people would ever want to take them off.
Seriously, finding bootlickers aren't hard. The better question to ask is how many voters are bootlickers and that typically hovers around 20-30%, so the follow-up question should be what type of platform could capture the remaining 70-80% of the electorate?
Turns out right to repair laws are very popular with voters and small business owners. Maybe we all start to tread down that path more and figure out what sorts of regulations pressures companies into adopting open standards?