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Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that, and also remote attestation is how Signal knows it's talking to a legitimate SGX enclave running the expected payload
I definitely want to do a post on confidential computing as well. Super cool stuff.
That is, the thing that people are actually talking about when they use that term: The means for companies and governments to usurp the ownership of consumer devices.
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Make no mistake. Shoving user-hostile malware down people's throats is the primary use case for this in the consumer space. Bootloader malware is very esoteric right now. Enterprise might have valid use cases beyond screwing people but none of them make sense for a consumer device.
I think consumer devices should have opt-outs for sure. But personally I am much more comfortable with myself and my family having fully locked down apple phones then anything else on the market right now, precisely because of how difficult it is to get persistent malware into that ecosystem.
I'd not be able to put up with that, but more importantly, I'd not want to be in the position where I can't even protest anything because there's no alternative to switch to..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make no mistake. Shoving user-hostile malware down people's throats is the primary use case for this in the consumer space. Bootloader malware is very esoteric right now. Enterprise might have valid use cases beyond screwing people but none of them make sense for a consumer device.
You say that, and also remote attestation is how Signal knows it's talking to a legitimate SGX enclave running the expected payload
SGX does not cryptographically guarantee this. It cryptographically guarantees that the processor contains a legitimate provisioning key signed by Intel. Intel pinky promises that its processor will then only use this provisioning key in certain ways. This promise is essentially unauditable, and previous SGX bugs have shown that Intel isn't really in a position to make it anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make no mistake. Shoving user-hostile malware down people's throats is the primary use case for this in the consumer space. Bootloader malware is very esoteric right now. Enterprise might have valid use cases beyond screwing people but none of them make sense for a consumer device.
You say that, and also remote attestation is how Signal knows it's talking to a legitimate SGX enclave running the expected payload
The only way to make remote attestation into a neutral technology is to prohibit privileged keys being loaded (and retained) by device manufacturers. This would make it impossible for arbitrary protocol counterparties to know if their attestation requests are being answered by hardware, or merely emulated in software. This approach is the only way to preserve computing freedom (ie the very concept of protocols that mediate between mutually-untrusting parties) in the presence of this technology.
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I mean, all tech can be used in different ways. My experience has been much more on the preventing root kits side, rather then vendor lock in. Yes, there can be exploits, but hardware exploits over a restricted interface (TPM2) are significantly rarer then normal software vulns. Everything is about risk mitigation, there is no perfect security.
Make no mistake. Shoving user-hostile malware down people's throats is the primary use case for this in the consumer space. Bootloader malware is very esoteric right now. Enterprise might have valid use cases beyond screwing people but none of them make sense for a consumer device.
One of the valid use cases on consumer devices is video game anti-cheat software. Theoretically remote attestation can enable them to be less invasive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make no mistake. Shoving user-hostile malware down people's throats is the primary use case for this in the consumer space. Bootloader malware is very esoteric right now. Enterprise might have valid use cases beyond screwing people but none of them make sense for a consumer device.
You say that, and also remote attestation is how Signal knows it's talking to a legitimate SGX enclave running the expected payload
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that, and also remote attestation is how Signal knows it's talking to a legitimate SGX enclave running the expected payload
There's some value in that, but Signal's main security proposition is that you don't have to trust the infrastructure. E2EE means even compromised server software can't read message contents.
It's a nice idea, but I wouldn't design any system on the assumption that a TPM needs to stay secure for the system to be safe. There's been so many exploits. We can consider the iphone as an R & D platform for doing blackbox computations. In that nothing is allowed to run that Apple doesn't want. Protecting that is apples bread and butter and they care about it enough to value critical exploits in the millions. Yet…
It's a nice idea, but I wouldn't design any system on the assumption that a TPM needs to stay secure for the system to be safe. There's been so many exploits. We can consider the iphone as an R & D platform for doing blackbox computations. In that nothing is allowed to run that Apple doesn't want. Protecting that is apples bread and butter and they care about it enough to value critical exploits in the millions. Yet…
There's also Memory Integrity Enforcement on the iPhone 17 chips which makes all memory exploits detectable by the OS so it can trigger a reboot and report the bug to Apple.
And even when exploits are found, the boot chain attestation means rebooting your iphone always clears out any malware that made it past normal sandboxing. Particularly at risk individuals should enable lockdown mode and periodically reboot.