Remote Attestation • Hacker News Board

Re: Remote Attestation

#111

Post by Zak » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 6:33 AM UTC

Cider9986 wrote: post #64

GrapheneOS has an implementation of this with their Auditor app. You can use their service or you can use another Android. No freedom lost, just security gained. https://attestation.app/about There's also Android's hardware attestation API which apps can use to verify integrity in a more secure and privacy-respecting way than Google Play Integrity. An increasing number of apps are officially supporting GrapheneOS thr…

The auditor app itself does not result in any loss of freedom, but the widespread availability of remote attestation mechanisms on end-user devices incentivizes others to use it in a manner that does.

A purely local mechanism that lets the user check the integrity of their system is great. Making it easy for third parties to inspect it is a severe violation of user freedom and privacy.

Re: Remote Attestation

#112

Post by justincormack » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #57

solenoid0937 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whenever I see "remote attestation" I associate this with "hostile" HN is bizarre. This is just standard infrastructure security practice at any tech company of meaningful size. You are misunderstanding the target use case and audience of this article.

It's absolutely useful for corporate owned infrastructure. But it's also useful for DRM stuff like authorized 4k blu-ray playback on PCs... which is only allowed on systems with Intel SGX.

Thats not true. Almost no consumer systems ship with SGX.

Re: Remote Attestation

#113

Post by Sayrus » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 8:57 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #106

Sayrus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since there have been multiple 0-day in kernels, we should drop all security boundaries in them because you'd only need execution on the machine and a known vulnerability. Since there have been with bypass on service X, we should remove auth because all you need is the vulnerability. Address space layout randomization wouldn't exist with this mindset, and yet it does and helps for many exploits. SGX is not fully secu…

When there is a 0-day in the kernel, you patch it. When there is a vulnerability in SGX, the attacker extracts the key from their own hardware from as many devices as they want and can permanently make whatever attestations they want with those keys.

Which makes you update hardware and have a window where you are vulnerable. It's terrible but not a blocker and as long as Intel releases new architectures it isn't much different from software issues. As far as I know, Granite Rapids SGX fused keys (FK0, FK1, GWK, FEK) were not yet extracted. Granite Rapids was released around ~2024 meaning an attacker need to hack the provider and perform a new extraction on SGX.