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Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

grapheneos.social

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Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#761

Post by rambambram »

anxoo wrote: post #724
sevenzero wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple always did this, everybody knew this and people buy Apple exactly because of this. Google now pulls the rug on Android which is a whole different story because it used to be open. The whole idea of Android was to be open.

this is that xkcd "regular people can only name a few common feldspars" meme. over 90% of consumers have no knowledge at all of tech corps' philosophy on user freedom, they just buy cheap phones that have good cameras and run instagram and tiktok well.

Thanks for the reminder, I needed that. I didn't know this xkcd, but I've bookmarked it.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#762

Post by someguyornotidk »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #748
vim-guru wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already in place in the EU back in 2024. Lookup DDAW. You can turn off warnings, but it will still keep on monitoring the driver

Wow! https://seeingmachines.com/understanding-driver-drowsiness-a... Since July 2022, Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning (DDAW) systems have been required in all new vehicle types within the European Union (EU). They will be mandatory for all newly registered vehicles from July 2024.

Guess I lost that bet before I even made it :(

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#763

Post by pocksuppet »

nullc wrote: post #253
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other is that because it's not possible to link an attestation to a particular device the only mitigation to abuse that is feasible is rate limiting I still don't see how you can keep something anonymous and still rate limit it. If a service can tell that two requests came from the same party in order to count them then two services can tell that two requests came from the same party (by both pretending to be t…

Just to give an example to prime your intuition: define your "usage token" as H(private_key|service_domain_name|date|4-bit_counter). Make your scheme provably reveal the usage token when you authenticate. Now you can use the service 16 times a day on a particular domain and no more simply by blocking token reuse. And yet the service has no ability to link different tokens to each other or to a specific person because…

This is useless. They want to be able to permanently ban an account that misbehaves - not limit it to misbehaving 16 times a day.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#764

Post by pocksuppet »

notpushkin wrote: post #675
pocksuppet wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to your bank, it has to cover you if your money gets stolen through a hack through their app, no matter what your operating system is.

I’d very much love to have an option to waive that cover though! Just give me a scary warning “hey, we’ve determined your device is unsafe; so if you get hacked through that device, you agree not to hold us liable for that. proceed? [y/N]” For more specific mitigations, they could issue shorter-living tokens to such devices, in case it gets stolen and it didn’t store the token properly (say, the user did something st…

You may waive that cover, but when (not if) you get hacked and your money gets stolen, someone still has to pay it back or you will die. Neither of those options are okay with the government and only one is okay with your bank.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#765

Post by fragmede »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #246
fragmede wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google et al go to the government and say The money that goes into lobbying in order to have that say is, depending on who you ask, corruption. I, as a random citizen, don't get the same say that a multi billion dollar international corporation does.

That seems like a pretty useless definition of corruption. It implies that retirees writing letters to Congress is "corruption" because working people don't have the same amount of free time to do that. It's also kind of weird to propose it as an asymmetry. Google's parent company spends around $4M on lobbying in the US: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... That's around $0.01 per capita. Y…

Money or equivalents (watches, golf tee times) changing hands would be the difference.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#766

Post by nullc »

pocksuppet wrote: post #763
nullc wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to give an example to prime your intuition: define your "usage token" as H(private_key|service_domain_name|date|4-bit_counter). Make your scheme provably reveal the usage token when you authenticate. Now you can use the service 16 times a day on a particular domain and no more simply by blocking token reuse. And yet the service has no ability to link different tokens to each other or to a specific person because…

This is useless. They want to be able to permanently ban an account that misbehaves - not limit it to misbehaving 16 times a day.

I have sympathy for the desire but that isn't something you actually get through google's surveillance-ware.

You can change the information you put into the hash in my example to get them one go per site per day or one per year or even one per site ever. But without giving cross site linkablity that does you no good or giving google visibility into everyone all the time.

But that still doesn't get you to your desired unevadable bans, but with suitable parameters it can get as close as google's spyware approach while being much more private.

I think time a time oriented rate limit makes the most sense considering the limits in practice (attacker just gets access to another discarded phone, or tricks someone into authenticating for them via theirs)-- basically means the best you can do against dedicate attackers is rate limit them. So why subject honest users who may have good privacy reasons to use multiple accounts over time to worse effective limits than attackers?

But you don't have to agree with that to accept that schemes much more private than google's are possible.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#767

Post by mike_hearn »

ogogmad wrote: post #673
mike_hearn wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spectre doesn't work across process boundaries, so I don't think they are. You can't Spectre your way into a banking app on an iPhone. Or if you can I'd like to see it in action.

I don’t think "Spectre doesn’t work across process boundaries" is correct as stated; cross-process and cross-security-domain Spectre attacks have been demonstrated. But I agree that "a malicious app can trivially Spectre its way into an arbitrary banking app on a patched iPhone" is a much stronger claim, and I’m not aware of a public demonstration of that exact attack. My point is only that process isolation alone is…

The only similar bug I'm aware of was Meltdown, an Intel only bug that was immediately patched with a microcode update. But Meltdown was a different bug to Spectre. Spectre is a class of attacks that's hard to solve by design, Meltdown was a specific bug that was easy to solve.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#768

Post by exo762 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178
coppsilgold wrote: post #98

Requiring 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…

> The other is that because it's not possible to link an attestation to a particular device the only mitigation to abuse that is feasible is rate limiting I still don't see how you can keep something anonymous and still rate limit it. If a service can tell that two requests came from the same party in order to count them then two services can tell that two requests came from the same party (by both pretending to be t…

> I still don't see how you can keep something anonymous and still rate limit it.

Constructions like this exist for many years. E.g. semaphore RLN (rate limiting nullifier). This particular construction was found unfeasible 7 years ago, but since then zksnark tech made huge progress and it is way cheaper now.

Re: Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

#770

Post by palata »

soraminazuki wrote: post #738
palata wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it still won't change the fact that the entire population is digitally surveilled 24/7 I agree that we are, I disagree that we are because all politicians are corrupt . Surveillance capitalism is the result of the private companies that built it, who could because they became so big, because of the lack of antitrust and stuff like the DCMA (and the equivalent that the US forced every other country to adopt). Did al…

I brought up the Snowden disclosure because it's significant. What governments along with the tech sector did behind our backs is a major violation of human rights and undermines the very foundations of the rule of law. After Snowden, politicians have no plausible deniability. We were all made aware what the consequences of our policies are, and it's only getting worse. Yet, instead of dismantling these illegal progr…

There are tons of politicians in many countries that oppose it.

It's too easy to blame "the politicians" for everything. In democracies, politicians are elected. People just have to vote. You wanted facts? The US people chose not to elect Bernie Sanders, and also chose to re-elect Trump.

Is the US people corrupt? I don't think so. They voted for what they thought would be best. Maybe they were wrong, maybe they were uninformed, maybe they were incompetent. But I wouldn't say all the voters had to be corrupt, there is no other explanation.

> politicians continue to expand its scope with laws like we're discussing here

And my point is that when we discuss such laws here, it is pretty obvious that many "tech-savvy people" have no idea about how it works and complain about the politicians not understanding either. All they know is that they are against it, and yell at it with many incorrect arguments. I find it a bit rich: politicians who are in favour of it do exactly the same thing: they don't understand how it works but they know that they are in favour, based on their limited understanding.

So those many people who are against could not inform the politicians, because they don't know themselves. What happens then? Politicians, who don't understand, are yelled at by people who disagree and mostly don't understand either. If a "good" politician tries to listen to some of those complaints, most likely they will see that the complaint is wrong, and then it would make sense for them to ignore it, wouldn't it?

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