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> I see that there's a lot of mindshare on privacy and "computing trust" these days. This is the opposite of respecting privacy (unless you mean e.g. the priva

> I see that there's a lot of mindshare on privacy and "computing trust" these days. This is the opposite of respecting privacy (unless you mean e.g. the privacy of DRM code), all of this stuff is "trusted" as in TCG.

Scene_Cast2 5y ago
Yep. Privacy is a heavily overloaded term; I meant it as a more industry-style "data access management". Some comments in the other thread do talk about non-DRM uses.
bawolff 5y ago
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ seems like an application of SGX where net privacy is increased.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Or, that looks like a single point of failure that would make a good target for the government to issue a National Security Letter to Intel for.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    NSLs are a subpoena. The government can't order you to include a backdoor. Granted, they have other leverage they could use, like export licenses or purchase contracts.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > The government can't order you to include a backdoor. Right, but it can order you to turn over your private keys, like it did to Lavabit[0]. Intel might instead voluntarily hand over a signed backdoored firmware, targeted at a specific set of CPUs, rather than the keys themselves, which could do more damage if the government lost control of them. Similarly I don't suppose it would be much harder for the NSA to get access to the physical servers that Signal is running its software on. Perhaps you could say that merely having the access credentials wouldn't be enough information for the NSA to take control of Signal's servers without them noticing, but any cloud provider that wants to do business with the government surely has special backdoors that make this easy, when presented with an NSL. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Its not perfect, but the more people in on a secret the harder it is to keep. Its much harder to have to coerce both intel and signal (even if you hack intel, you would still have to modify signal's servers from what i understand) than just signal.
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    What would that accomplish?
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    It’s better than before, where all that stuff was available in plaintext
    - milkey_mouse 5y ago
      Signal didn't back up contacts and settings to their servers until they implemented "Secure Value Recovery", which relies on SGX to rate-limit guesses of a weak PIN. If SGX is broken and Signal's database falls into the wrong hands, encryption keys could be brute-forced pretty quickly (most people have 4-digit PINs).

Scene_Cast2 5y ago

Yep. Privacy is a heavily overloaded term; I meant it as a more industry-style "data access management". Some comments in the other thread do talk about non-DRM uses.

bawolff 5y ago

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ seems like an application of SGX where net privacy is increased.

dane-pgp 5y ago
Or, that looks like a single point of failure that would make a good target for the government to issue a National Security Letter to Intel for.
- xxpor 5y ago
  NSLs are a subpoena. The government can't order you to include a backdoor. Granted, they have other leverage they could use, like export licenses or purchase contracts.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > The government can't order you to include a backdoor. Right, but it can order you to turn over your private keys, like it did to Lavabit[0]. Intel might instead voluntarily hand over a signed backdoored firmware, targeted at a specific set of CPUs, rather than the keys themselves, which could do more damage if the government lost control of them. Similarly I don't suppose it would be much harder for the NSA to get access to the physical servers that Signal is running its software on. Perhaps you could say that merely having the access credentials wouldn't be enough information for the NSA to take control of Signal's servers without them noticing, but any cloud provider that wants to do business with the government surely has special backdoors that make this easy, when presented with an NSL. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
- bawolff 5y ago
  Its not perfect, but the more people in on a secret the harder it is to keep. Its much harder to have to coerce both intel and signal (even if you hack intel, you would still have to modify signal's servers from what i understand) than just signal.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  What would that accomplish?
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  It’s better than before, where all that stuff was available in plaintext
  - milkey_mouse 5y ago
    Signal didn't back up contacts and settings to their servers until they implemented "Secure Value Recovery", which relies on SGX to rate-limit guesses of a weak PIN. If SGX is broken and Signal's database falls into the wrong hands, encryption keys could be brute-forced pretty quickly (most people have 4-digit PINs).