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Do you feel the same way about cloud providers? Should they always be able to see everything and tamper with anything for the workloads their users run? If that

Do you feel the same way about cloud providers? Should they always be able to see everything and tamper with anything for the workloads their users run? If that’s the case, would you be in favor of making contracts to that effect (as already exist for all cloud providers I’m aware of) unenforceable?

matheusmoreira 6y ago
I agree that trusted computing can be a good thing for cloud computing providers. They own the computer hardware but other people are paying them in order to use those resources. That's the entire point of cloud computing. The user and owner of the hardware are different people and so offering trusted computing as a feature makes sense. Consumers are the opposite: they pay companies in order to use their software on their computers. The owner and user of the machine are the same person. Users should get to maintain complete control over the hardware, including the ability to reverse engineer the software and even make "unauthorized" copies of anything they want. I don't trust that this technology will be restricted to cloud computing though. The copyright industry is worth billions of dollars. They'll make use of it on consumer machines if it's available. This is something that should be prevented at all costs, since the worst case scenario is a world where all commercial software runs in a secure execution environment where the user has no control. Threat models where the user is an adversary are obviously user hostile. So of course whenever these technologies are compromised it is a victory for software freedom.
- lxgr 6y ago
  > Users should get to maintain complete control over the hardware, including the ability to reverse engineer the software Secure enclaves and auditable software are not mutually exclusive. It's totally possible to run open source software in an enclave! > the worst case scenario is a world where all commercial software runs in a secure execution environment where the user has no control. This would be a very bad scenario indeed, but I consider it completely unrealistic. The trusted computing base of an entire graphical computing device including its operating system and all installed applications is absolutely impossible to audit. It didn't work for Microsoft (Palladium), and it's also not the direction that Apple is going, arguably one of the most restrictive client platforms today. Practical trusted computing are tiny (and ideally heavily sandboxed!) trusted enclaves running the least amount of critical, audited code.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

I agree that trusted computing can be a good thing for cloud computing providers. They own the computer hardware but other people are paying them in order to use those resources. That's the entire point of cloud computing. The user and owner of the hardware are different people and so offering trusted computing as a feature makes sense. Consumers are the opposite: they pay companies in order to use their software on their computers. The owner and user of the machine are the same person. Users should get to maintain complete control over the hardware, including the ability to reverse engineer the software and even make "unauthorized" copies of anything they want. I don't trust that this technology will be restricted to cloud computing though. The copyright industry is worth billions of dollars. They'll make use of it on consumer machines if it's available. This is something that should be prevented at all costs, since the worst case scenario is a world where all commercial software runs in a secure execution environment where the user has no control. Threat models where the user is an adversary are obviously user hostile. So of course whenever these technologies are compromised it is a victory for software freedom.

lxgr 6y ago
> Users should get to maintain complete control over the hardware, including the ability to reverse engineer the software Secure enclaves and auditable software are not mutually exclusive. It's totally possible to run open source software in an enclave! > the worst case scenario is a world where all commercial software runs in a secure execution environment where the user has no control. This would be a very bad scenario indeed, but I consider it completely unrealistic. The trusted computing base of an entire graphical computing device including its operating system and all installed applications is absolutely impossible to audit. It didn't work for Microsoft (Palladium), and it's also not the direction that Apple is going, arguably one of the most restrictive client platforms today. Practical trusted computing are tiny (and ideally heavily sandboxed!) trusted enclaves running the least amount of critical, audited code.