11 ms·

A previous HN link is here -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131431 -- which links to MS's original press

A previous HN link is here -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131431 -- which links to MS's original press release -- https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-microsoft-pluton-processor-the-security-chip-designed-for-the-future-of-windows-pcs/ https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-.... That article explicitly states that it was designed originally for the xbox. I worry that going to be a very anti-consumer, anti-free-speech, DRM heavy chip that MS want to popularise as an alternative to the (still hated in some circles) TPM. Why else would they design it for the xbox, of all things? Is it aimed to stop speculative execution attacks on a cloud server, or provide Level 4 DRM to Widevine's as-yet-unannounced competitor?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gotstad 6y ago
How do you see it being anti-free-speech?
- core-questions 6y ago
  Virtually every technology that can be used to create a walled garden with moderation can be bent to limit people's ability to speak freely. How long until someone has a device which can go to Netflix, social networking, etc. but doesn't have a web browser on it that can load arbitrary pages, and it's impossible to jailbreak? Since we have no freedom of speech within FAANG properties, that would be a considerable restriction of speech... I do always find it wryly amusing when people who identify as being on the left see that the right are the only people who need defense using free speech laws, and then happily allow private industry to restrict speech since it doesn't impact them. The shoe could just as easily be on the other foot, and may well again be one day - principles matter.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    > principles matter To whom, though? Everybody is praising Apple for their (admittedly quite excellent) M1 hardware and no one seems to take issue with that either. You cannot have truly open hardware as long as (software-) patents and IP exist, simple as that. Companies need to protect their investment, since the days of comparatively simple CPUs are over and a lot of "secret sauce" is actually software and licensed IP blocks. Since patent holders are free to select who their licensee is, they'll always target the ones with the biggest margins (see for example [1]) so mainly consumer products and thus those won't be free (as in speech) anytime soon. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/nokia-seeks-to-block-lenovo-sales-in-germany-after-injunction https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/nokia-see...
    - core-questions 6y ago
      All of that hardware would be just fine if we had a Bill of Rights for the Internet that ensured free speech rights and ability to host content (of any sort that isn't strictly prohibited already) is enshrined in law. Pity all these laws end up spending most of their time enabling obscenity instead of political speech.
    - xg15 6y ago
      This is all probably true, but doesn't change the point that the consequences of those perfectly reasonable business descisions will have massive effects on personal freedom.
  - fwip 6y ago
    I can't use my shoe to post on Hacker News. Why is it a free speech issue for a device to exist that can go to Twitter but doesn't host your blog for you?
    - core-questions 6y ago
      The issue is that the device may not be able to go to blogs hosted outside of the Trusted Ecosystem of Fact-Check Verified Not-Fake-News Websites, one day. Who knows?
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > How long until someone has a device which can go to Netflix, social networking, etc. but doesn't have a web browser on it that can load arbitrary pages, and it's impossible to jailbreak? Such a locked-down device wouldn't really be anything new, we already have Roku, Chromecast, Chromebook, and games consoles. They don't threaten the 'ordinary' PC market.
    - core-questions 6y ago
      It's been an incremental war. For context, I've been posting about this for 20 years; during that time all the devices you say "we already have" were invented. This has eaten away at the average person's computing freedom, ironically while providing them a ton more computing power and capability. > They don't threaten the 'ordinary' PC market. Not directly, but think about this: * I know people who do not own a PC anymore, they just have tablet, phone, and TV. No need, apparently, but... * This results in a ton of kids growing up without early exposure to general purpose computing * This has been an increasing trend for quite some time now, and Pluton is just the next incarnation of Palladium, which tells us that Microsoft really does still see a completely captured market in their future. Linux plays a role, but in the embrace-and-extend sense; while WSL helps squeeze Linux out as a desktop OS down on the ground, Microsoft's ownership of Github cements it in the cloud. I know, I know, old man yells at cloud, I don't expect this train to stop, I just want people to stop and think once in a while about where it might be going. It's OK to dream up worst-case scenarios and then strategize for how you might fend off that eventuality even if it's unlikely.
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        > ton of kids growing up without early exposure to general purpose computing I agree that's a problem. It's possible to learn to code on an iPad, [0] but the system is generally closed to exploration. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-code/id1354133284 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-code/id13...
dpoochieni 6y ago
Imagine it being capable of enforcing something like which executables you are able to load... Quite in the vein of Apple sending the executables hash to some random server
- phkahler 6y ago
  Imagine it can only run MS Linux or Windows.
- qayxc 6y ago
  That's not how that works. At all.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Another commenter familiar with the tech said: Pluton can securely track what software was booted on the main core (called "measure boot") and it basically sends a hash of that to the cloud to prove to the cloud what software is currently running. That sounds like most of what you need to build a system that can enforce what executables you're allowed to load and prevent you from attaching a debugger.
    - qayxc 6y ago
      You omitted the context there: the poster was talking about Azure Sphere - IoT devices that use Pluton for verification with remote services. That's a different use case (chip-to-cloud). It can also not prevent you from attaching a debugger when all you need to do is to go offline. In fact, the whole point is that you can run anything without compromising the security of the data in the secure enclave. That's what Zero-Trust is all about.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        As a feature for cloud chips, it's great. If it goes into client chips, and someone uses it for DRM, that's awful. I guess we'll see?
    - 6y ago
ffhhj 6y ago
Seems like a good way to perform surveillance, governments and agencies will be the clients. "You are our product" - Microsoft
qayxc 6y ago
> Why else would they design it for the xbox, of all things? If you really want to know the answer, here's the lead engineer explaining it en detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  Dave Cutler was even more explicit about what was intended with the design of the XBox. If the user attempts to modify the system, it will brick itself. https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss?t=3500 https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss?t=3500
- azalemeth 6y ago
  He says in pretty much literally the opening sentence that it's for DRM: "we want to prevent the piracy of games", and then goes on to justify that their business model involves making a loss on each xbox sold, and wants to ensure that the CPU only runs Microsoft code against the wishes of the Xbox owner. A later direct quote is "the fundamental difference between Windows security and Xbox security is that the owner _is_ the bad guy". That's not something I want in my general-purpose computing device where I am the owner.
  - api 6y ago
    Then don't buy stuff like that. None of this stuff will change unless people vote with their wallets. Companies have the idea that nobody cares. I've actually heard "nobody cares about privacy and security" repeated as a mantra in multiple circles.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      There are two meaningful options for CPU. If they both adopt the tech...
      - api 6y ago
        ... they create a niche for a third ... provided there are enough people who care. If nobody cares nobody cares.
bitL 6y ago
Boiling frog stuff... We complained about this 20 years ago, all these moves were known back then, yet here we are. More to come - TPM required to connect to the Internet and access news sources without any ability to store information on our own devices. Followed by rewriting historical articles to properly "sanitize" content.
- api 6y ago
  User experience is everything, and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. I've been yelling about that for years and years and very few people seem to get it. Free as in freedom got conflated with free as in beer years ago, and FOSS today is not much more than "waaah gimme free stuff!" It's not a gift culture. It's a "take culture." Anyone who suggests any change to FOSS culture to remedy this problem gets shouted down. Any license that tries to remedy it gets attacked as "not OSI compliant" and restricting peoples' rights. Meanwhile commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience. While the license purists yell about "restrictive licenses" taking away rights, the gravity of the walled gardens becomes more and more powerful. The choice is between free and freedom.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    > User experience is everything It's very important, but it's not "everything". > and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. By that logic, most FOSS should not have existed at all. > Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. That's often true. It's certainly true for some of the software projects I maintain. > Commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience That's not possible even with infinite resources, because FOSS software is sometimes great, often good, and also often the only thing available.
  - 6y ago
kmeisthax 6y ago
So, the Trusted Platform Module itself isn't a DRM solution. It's a chip that hangs off the LPC/ISA bus and holds a crypto key generated from boot stage hashes that your BIOS, bootloader, and operating system provide to it. The idea is that all of those hashes together form a key that would change if any stage were tampered with, and that by encrypting things with the key you can prove that those particular things haven't changed. It's not particularly practical to build a DRM scheme out of a Trusted Platform Module, notably because the key attestation the TPM provides audits a particular combination of boot stages, not a particular piece of hardware. DRM vendors don't care about you updating your firmware, but they do care about videos being locked to a particular authorized piece of hardware. If you had a TPM-based DRM, you'd deauthorize your video downloads by just updating your BIOS, while videos you passed from one person to another on the same OS version would play just fine. I imagine Pluton is trying to be a competitor to Intel ME or AMD PSP, which are things you can use to isolate software running on shared hardware. For example, Intel ME provides hardware support for Intel Software Guard Extensions, which is used to isolate DRM from the host operating system. AMD has something similar with Secure Encrypted Virtualization, which uses the PSP to set up different memory-encrypted containers for each VM that higher security rings can't access. In this case, locking down PCs from arbitrary code, like an Xbox, isn't really on the menu. What they're looking to do is carve out space in Ring 3 that Ring 0 can't touch.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Right, and this is why people are concerned: it puts DRM in a black box that is "untouchable", which is kind of the holy grail of the obfuscation that DRM requires.
- baby 6y ago
  I see Pluton more as a "competitor" to Apple's Secure Enclave Processor and Google's Titan chip, and getting rid of the nightmare that TPM was/is.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    I thought that specific implementations had issues in the past but that the concept of a TPM in general was fine? The Intel ME and AMD PSP, on the other hand, are proper nightmares. For that matter, so is any other "security co-processor" that operates as an unauditable black box below ring 0 (presumably this applies to both Apple's and Google's solutions).
heavyset_go 6y ago
Stallman[1] and others[2] have talked about just this problem for over a decade now. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gotstad 6y ago

How do you see it being anti-free-speech?

core-questions 6y ago
Virtually every technology that can be used to create a walled garden with moderation can be bent to limit people's ability to speak freely. How long until someone has a device which can go to Netflix, social networking, etc. but doesn't have a web browser on it that can load arbitrary pages, and it's impossible to jailbreak? Since we have no freedom of speech within FAANG properties, that would be a considerable restriction of speech... I do always find it wryly amusing when people who identify as being on the left see that the right are the only people who need defense using free speech laws, and then happily allow private industry to restrict speech since it doesn't impact them. The shoe could just as easily be on the other foot, and may well again be one day - principles matter.
- qayxc 6y ago
  > principles matter To whom, though? Everybody is praising Apple for their (admittedly quite excellent) M1 hardware and no one seems to take issue with that either. You cannot have truly open hardware as long as (software-) patents and IP exist, simple as that. Companies need to protect their investment, since the days of comparatively simple CPUs are over and a lot of "secret sauce" is actually software and licensed IP blocks. Since patent holders are free to select who their licensee is, they'll always target the ones with the biggest margins (see for example [1]) so mainly consumer products and thus those won't be free (as in speech) anytime soon. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/nokia-seeks-to-block-lenovo-sales-in-germany-after-injunction https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/nokia-see...
  - core-questions 6y ago
    All of that hardware would be just fine if we had a Bill of Rights for the Internet that ensured free speech rights and ability to host content (of any sort that isn't strictly prohibited already) is enshrined in law. Pity all these laws end up spending most of their time enabling obscenity instead of political speech.
  - xg15 6y ago
    This is all probably true, but doesn't change the point that the consequences of those perfectly reasonable business descisions will have massive effects on personal freedom.
- fwip 6y ago
  I can't use my shoe to post on Hacker News. Why is it a free speech issue for a device to exist that can go to Twitter but doesn't host your blog for you?
  - core-questions 6y ago
    The issue is that the device may not be able to go to blogs hosted outside of the Trusted Ecosystem of Fact-Check Verified Not-Fake-News Websites, one day. Who knows?
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > How long until someone has a device which can go to Netflix, social networking, etc. but doesn't have a web browser on it that can load arbitrary pages, and it's impossible to jailbreak? Such a locked-down device wouldn't really be anything new, we already have Roku, Chromecast, Chromebook, and games consoles. They don't threaten the 'ordinary' PC market.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    It's been an incremental war. For context, I've been posting about this for 20 years; during that time all the devices you say "we already have" were invented. This has eaten away at the average person's computing freedom, ironically while providing them a ton more computing power and capability. > They don't threaten the 'ordinary' PC market. Not directly, but think about this: * I know people who do not own a PC anymore, they just have tablet, phone, and TV. No need, apparently, but... * This results in a ton of kids growing up without early exposure to general purpose computing * This has been an increasing trend for quite some time now, and Pluton is just the next incarnation of Palladium, which tells us that Microsoft really does still see a completely captured market in their future. Linux plays a role, but in the embrace-and-extend sense; while WSL helps squeeze Linux out as a desktop OS down on the ground, Microsoft's ownership of Github cements it in the cloud. I know, I know, old man yells at cloud, I don't expect this train to stop, I just want people to stop and think once in a while about where it might be going. It's OK to dream up worst-case scenarios and then strategize for how you might fend off that eventuality even if it's unlikely.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > ton of kids growing up without early exposure to general purpose computing I agree that's a problem. It's possible to learn to code on an iPad, [0] but the system is generally closed to exploration. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-code/id1354133284 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-code/id13...

dpoochieni 6y ago

Imagine it being capable of enforcing something like which executables you are able to load... Quite in the vein of Apple sending the executables hash to some random server

phkahler 6y ago
Imagine it can only run MS Linux or Windows.
qayxc 6y ago
That's not how that works. At all.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Another commenter familiar with the tech said: Pluton can securely track what software was booted on the main core (called "measure boot") and it basically sends a hash of that to the cloud to prove to the cloud what software is currently running. That sounds like most of what you need to build a system that can enforce what executables you're allowed to load and prevent you from attaching a debugger.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    You omitted the context there: the poster was talking about Azure Sphere - IoT devices that use Pluton for verification with remote services. That's a different use case (chip-to-cloud). It can also not prevent you from attaching a debugger when all you need to do is to go offline. In fact, the whole point is that you can run anything without compromising the security of the data in the secure enclave. That's what Zero-Trust is all about.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      As a feature for cloud chips, it's great. If it goes into client chips, and someone uses it for DRM, that's awful. I guess we'll see?
  - 6y ago

ffhhj 6y ago

Seems like a good way to perform surveillance, governments and agencies will be the clients. "You are our product" - Microsoft

qayxc 6y ago

> Why else would they design it for the xbox, of all things? If you really want to know the answer, here's the lead engineer explaining it en detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0

GeekyBear 6y ago
Dave Cutler was even more explicit about what was intended with the design of the XBox. If the user attempts to modify the system, it will brick itself. https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss?t=3500 https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss?t=3500
azalemeth 6y ago
He says in pretty much literally the opening sentence that it's for DRM: "we want to prevent the piracy of games", and then goes on to justify that their business model involves making a loss on each xbox sold, and wants to ensure that the CPU only runs Microsoft code against the wishes of the Xbox owner. A later direct quote is "the fundamental difference between Windows security and Xbox security is that the owner _is_ the bad guy". That's not something I want in my general-purpose computing device where I am the owner.
- api 6y ago
  Then don't buy stuff like that. None of this stuff will change unless people vote with their wallets. Companies have the idea that nobody cares. I've actually heard "nobody cares about privacy and security" repeated as a mantra in multiple circles.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    There are two meaningful options for CPU. If they both adopt the tech...
    - api 6y ago
      ... they create a niche for a third ... provided there are enough people who care. If nobody cares nobody cares.

bitL 6y ago

Boiling frog stuff... We complained about this 20 years ago, all these moves were known back then, yet here we are. More to come - TPM required to connect to the Internet and access news sources without any ability to store information on our own devices. Followed by rewriting historical articles to properly "sanitize" content.

api 6y ago
User experience is everything, and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. I've been yelling about that for years and years and very few people seem to get it. Free as in freedom got conflated with free as in beer years ago, and FOSS today is not much more than "waaah gimme free stuff!" It's not a gift culture. It's a "take culture." Anyone who suggests any change to FOSS culture to remedy this problem gets shouted down. Any license that tries to remedy it gets attacked as "not OSI compliant" and restricting peoples' rights. Meanwhile commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience. While the license purists yell about "restrictive licenses" taking away rights, the gravity of the walled gardens becomes more and more powerful. The choice is between free and freedom.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > User experience is everything It's very important, but it's not "everything". > and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. By that logic, most FOSS should not have existed at all. > Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. That's often true. It's certainly true for some of the software projects I maintain. > Commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience That's not possible even with infinite resources, because FOSS software is sometimes great, often good, and also often the only thing available.
- 6y ago

kmeisthax 6y ago

So, the Trusted Platform Module itself isn't a DRM solution. It's a chip that hangs off the LPC/ISA bus and holds a crypto key generated from boot stage hashes that your BIOS, bootloader, and operating system provide to it. The idea is that all of those hashes together form a key that would change if any stage were tampered with, and that by encrypting things with the key you can prove that those particular things haven't changed. It's not particularly practical to build a DRM scheme out of a Trusted Platform Module, notably because the key attestation the TPM provides audits a particular combination of boot stages, not a particular piece of hardware. DRM vendors don't care about you updating your firmware, but they do care about videos being locked to a particular authorized piece of hardware. If you had a TPM-based DRM, you'd deauthorize your video downloads by just updating your BIOS, while videos you passed from one person to another on the same OS version would play just fine. I imagine Pluton is trying to be a competitor to Intel ME or AMD PSP, which are things you can use to isolate software running on shared hardware. For example, Intel ME provides hardware support for Intel Software Guard Extensions, which is used to isolate DRM from the host operating system. AMD has something similar with Secure Encrypted Virtualization, which uses the PSP to set up different memory-encrypted containers for each VM that higher security rings can't access. In this case, locking down PCs from arbitrary code, like an Xbox, isn't really on the menu. What they're looking to do is carve out space in Ring 3 that Ring 0 can't touch.

saagarjha 6y ago
Right, and this is why people are concerned: it puts DRM in a black box that is "untouchable", which is kind of the holy grail of the obfuscation that DRM requires.
baby 6y ago
I see Pluton more as a "competitor" to Apple's Secure Enclave Processor and Google's Titan chip, and getting rid of the nightmare that TPM was/is.
- Reelin 6y ago
  I thought that specific implementations had issues in the past but that the concept of a TPM in general was fine? The Intel ME and AMD PSP, on the other hand, are proper nightmares. For that matter, so is any other "security co-processor" that operates as an unauditable black box below ring 0 (presumably this applies to both Apple's and Google's solutions).

heavyset_go 6y ago

Stallman[1] and others[2] have talked about just this problem for over a decade now. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html