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I'm completely missing how his example of a Word document that can only be opened by approved users on approved hardware within the corporation is supposed to b

I'm completely missing how his example of a Word document that can only be opened by approved users on approved hardware within the corporation is supposed to be a bad thing. Honestly, that sounds pretty fantastic. I've been using 3rd party tools/extensions to do this sort of thing in corporate and government environments for years, but having the attestation go all the way down to the hardware level is a big value-add, especially with so much ransomware/spyware/extortion/espionage going on these days. Can someone please explain to me how the author might see this level of security as a bad thing?

ctoth 4y ago
So if I'm understanding this correctly, you'd prefer to live in the world where the Collateral Murder Wikileaks video of journalists being murdered in cold blood was never released because it was hardware locked to the original military system it was found on? Or maybe some large viral video which triggers a social uprising simply won't play. You are seriously so focused on pointless corporate secrets that you would actually consider giving the people in charge of the control over your information stream the ability to decide that something just shouldn't be shown? Because what? It might make discovery for a lawsuit more difficult? It'll make it easier to hide malfeasance? This seems particularly useful if you are trying to pretend that May 35th never happened, for instance. Terrifying, and rather icky.
ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago
What you can install on YOUR pc will be at the sole mercy of microsoft/or maybe someone else.... That's the cusp of it. Not that it can be used for good, but that it sets the way for heavy misuse by large corporations. Wait a few years. Smaller companies won't even be allowed to order high end cpu's. You'll be at 100% mercy of these corporations. If after 2 years they decide to brick your pc, they'll just do it. You think government will help you out here? Lol...
- eertvertvbw 4y ago
  still waiting on the secure boot lockdown everyone has insisted is coming for the better part of two decades...
  - alex7734 4y ago
    The goal is not to prevent you from running Linux, is to make it so that Linux cannot access the content you are interested in. Remote Attestation establishes a root of trust that can be used to verify that all of the software down the line is "approved": - You won't be able to browse sites or use apps with ads unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser that does not block ads. - You won't be able to browse sites with captchas unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser that does not allow bots to interact with the browser. - You won't be able to run Netflix unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser so that you can't record the content. - You won't be able to play online games unless, again, you run a 'trusted' device and OS so that you cannot cheat, or more importantly modify it in any way (why would you purchase skins if you can mod them in?). - You won't be able to use online banking unless you use a trusted OS because banks. Remote Attestation is pretty terrifying and it will be here soon unless it is regulated out of existence, which is unlikely.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      As someone who enjoys hacking, looking at that list sounds terrible. As a regular user, most of that list doesn't sound too bad. Their future devices will automatically have these features enabled, they're not likely to change those settings to "break" their device (from the perspective of Trusted Computing) so they'll have a smooth experience getting into it. - Can't block ads? A lot of average users already don't/don't know how, but this one would probably would affect a lot of people. Probably a bad thing no matter how you slice it. - They'll have a better experience online as they won't be interrupted with captchas. Wouldn't you prefer if you never experienced captchas and logins were smoother and easier? So a wash to a positive for an average user. - This makes it an easier deal for streaming services to let you cache their DRM'd content offline and makes the deals they have to cut with media companies potentially cheaper. Once again they're probably buying off the shelf computing devices which will probably work seamlessly with these restrictions, so they either won't notice anything or potentially get more features than they have now with those services they're already using. I'm not necessarily a fan of DRM but the market has largely spoken, people prefer streaming rather than actually owning the media. - Fewer cheaters in online games sure sounds like a positive to me. - My bank account online is more secure? This is a bad thing?
- matthewfcarlson 4y ago
  This smacks of fear mongering. The scenario you've outlined is just absurd. Many manufactures have pledged to turn this off by default and be an opt-in model. I'm not disagreeing that laptops given out by corporations for to you to use for work won't be heavily locked down and could be bricked remotely. But most laptops today already come this way from IT.
  - nightski 4y ago
    It's not absurd at all. It already happens on a large portion of computing devices in existence (iOS).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dx034 4y ago
  Secure chips like this are already in all devices but PCs. And in none of these areas has any of that happened. Quite the opposite, Apple got a fine when they slowed down older devices to save battery (at least what they said). So the government will clearly help out here. And none of these companies has an incentives to stop sales to smaller companies, they make a lot of money with those.
  - reedjosh 4y ago
    > So the government will clearly help out here. The government is probably part of the driving factor in building this system. The government probably doesn't want Wikileaks type material to be rendered. There are _so_ many ways the government likely wants to abuse this.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    > Quite the opposite, Apple got a fine when they slowed down older devices to save battery But the devices were actually slowed down, so the danger is real.
    - dx034 4y ago
      And Apple had to revert it and got punished for it. What more do you want?
      - fsflover 4y ago
        Good laws should prevent crimes, not just punish for committing them.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Secure chips like this are already in all devices but PCs. And in none of these areas has any of that happened. Ah, that must be why we all have root access and can freely modify or install anything we want on every device we own! Oh, wait, we don't have those things and our non-PC systems are increasingly locked down and routinely do things against the wishes of the people who own them.
  - 4y ago
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations and govs to prevent wisthleblowers and journalists to do their job. Or to prevent employees to get evidences of mistreatments in case they need to sue. Because if you look at it, it's basically just a system for information control. And bad actors love that. And of course it will be "for security reasons". Trusting people with a terrible track record to not abuse a massive power in the future, espacially one that can be scaled up with the push of a button once the infrastructure is in place, is not a good bet.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months. Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Have you read the books being banned?
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades. Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator. In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time. > Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist). I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.
squiffsquiff 4y ago
Sure it's fantastic in a corporate environment. Not so fantastic for personal devices. Basically this: https://youtu.be/XgFbqSYdNK4 https://youtu.be/XgFbqSYdNK4
- nine_k 4y ago
  Well, don't put that on a personal device. It's like your company giving you serious protecting gear to wear while doing your work on a nuclear reactor is a good thing. But having to wear such gear at home is not a popular choice, and should not be required.
  - palata 4y ago
    How do you choose what you put in your CPU? What when Windows forces you to have that kind of hardware? You can choose not to wear that gear, but choosing to not use Windows is much more complicated, at least for most people.
    - josephg 4y ago
      I imagine if the proponents of these systems had their way, they'd add remote attestation to websites too. Imagine your bank's website only loading on a "secure" windows environment, non-rooted android phone or an iphone. Once these chips are in everyone's devices, it would be quite easy to add this stuff technically. And in doing so, break the web on non-approved hardware or software (like linux). Edit: Actually on the subject of worst case scenarios: If the trusted computing attestation process was extended through the web browser, it would be possible to build a website which is impossible to scrape or interact with in any unapproved way, from any unapproved device. Eat your heart out Aaron Schwartz.
      - nobody9999 4y ago
        > imagine if the proponents of these systems had their way, they'd add remote attestation to websites too. Imagine your bank's website only loading on a "secure" windows environment, non-rooted android phone or an iphone. Actually, IIUC this is already the case on Android[0]. Some (many? most?) banks/banking apps are rejecting (and/or complaining about) access from rooted phones right now. I can't confirm this personally, as I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears than use a surveillance device^W^W smart phone to do anything financially related. Perhaps someone who uses banking apps on their surveillance device could chime in on that? [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/241012/safetynet-explained-why-android-pay-and-other-apps-dont-work-on-rooted-devices/ https://www.howtogeek.com/241012/safetynet-explained-why-and...
POPOSYS 4y ago
What tools are you using today to realize this scenario? Thanks!
- Gh0stRAT 4y ago
  The plugin my current employer uses is so well integrated that I don't even know its name. (I suspect it may be developed internally) At a past job, we used Entrust [0] and I'm aware of Virtru [1] as well. Edit: I forgot about Sharepoint, which also sort-of fills the ACL document-sharing niche. (though I'm less certain about whether it uses encryption to enforce its access policies) [0] https://www.entrust.com/ https://www.entrust.com/ [1] https://www.virtru.com/ https://www.virtru.com/
zaptheimpaler 4y ago
The same things that make it good in a corporate environment can make it abusive in a personal machine. By forcing the kernel to be untamperable, Microsoft can arbitrarily enforce ANY policy they choose on your PC. They could spy on every single piece of network communication. They could ban any given software from being able to run on Windows - maybe Chrome, maybe Steam, any competitor at all. They actually could easily enforce laws on banned content too - any given website, book, audio or video could be impossible to consume, and an attempt to try could be reported to Microsoft. They could stream the contents of your display and mic and camera at any time to anyone they choose. There is literally nothing they cannot do with complete control over the kernel. And since the kernel and Windows itself is closed source, there are ways to hide all of it so you would never even know. Security is great but it also goes hand-in-hand with control and surveillance. Every capability to increase security also increases the amount of control those providing the security have.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > They actually could easily enforce laws on banned content too Exactly this. As soon as governments (or lobbyists) discover that this level of control is available to them, they will introduce whatever remaining laws they need, banning E2E encrypted chat apps, or Tor, or bittorrent clients. I suspect that, like civil asset forfeiture, or running commands on botnet-infected devices[0], these actions will have only the thinnest veneer of "due process" applied to them. After all, if your computer is running "illegal" software, why should the government wait for your permission before deleting that software, or even tell you that it had done it after the fact? [0] https://uk.pcmag.com/security/139675/us-disrupts-cyclops-blink-botnet-by-hacking-infected-devices https://uk.pcmag.com/security/139675/us-disrupts-cyclops-bli...
- cesarb 4y ago
  > They could ban any given software from being able to run on Windows - maybe Chrome, maybe Steam, any competitor at all. IIRC, this was the reason Valve created SteamOS: they feared Microsoft would use their control over Windows so that the only viable software store on PCs would be Microsoft's own store.
wazoox 4y ago
Remember when Snowden and Manning leaked huge troves of secret information about the crimes of the State? Remember when a bunch of journos got their hands on the so-called "Panama papers"? Basically, this will make transparency even harder than it already is. That's a terrible danger for democracy at large. Stalin's wet dream.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Yep that’s why we should ban passwords. /s
npteljes 4y ago
The way I see it: Whatever happens, the system will get abused, and so, I weigh the potential abuses along with the potential benefits. With remote attestation, you put a lot of control in the hands whoever controls the "remote", making the situation very asymmetrical, and so, ripe for centralized abuse. For example, with centralized trust systems, a leak of the signing keys are devastating for the system. For an example, see the DVD key leak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
raxxorraxor 4y ago
Because that doesn't work. 2h before someone complains to IT that he cannot write/read/delete said Word document. Then management says X indeed needs access. Now you have created a maintenance nightmare sourced in rather weird security requirements. Could as well gouge out the eyes of everyone not having a read permission on said document. There are 1001 solution to solve such problems. And as a gigantic bonus it doesn't have to be bound to hardware! User permission management is much easier.
nisegami 4y ago
The difference between ransomware/spyware/extortion/espionage and whistleblowing/free sharing of information is just one of perspective.
pid-1 4y ago
Yeah I totally would like all "doomsday scenarios" in my company, non ironically.
qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago
what's stopping someone from taking photos of your precious document and posting them on 4chan? nothing. there's nothing you can do to stop that.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  In corporate and government environments, I imagine that they'll ban employees / civil servants from bringing camera(phone)s to work, and necessarily forbid them working from home. The only question is whether they will trust metal detectors to prevent whistleblowers from bringing in these devices, or if they will rely on strip searches and CCTV.
- fsflover 4y ago
  Try to scan banknotes with a scanner and you will see.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Linux/BSD will do it fine.
    - fsflover 4y ago
      I thought it was in the scanner firmware.
  - qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago
    if you mean there are scanners that prevent you from scanning of a banknote, that's another great example of wasting time, money and resources to accomplish nothing
- autoexec 4y ago
  I can discretely copy GBs of email messages and word docs in a reasonable amount of time, but I couldn't discretely take cell phone pictures of every page of every one of those messages and documents if I had years to do it. You don't always have to prevent something 100% of the time in every possible situation to have a devastating effect on people who want to do that thing.
_8j50 4y ago
It doesn't protect from malicious document leakage: you can still take screenshots or photographs or use a plain txt file. For unintentional leakage, MSIP already does what you are saying this just bakes into hardware where patching/fixes are harder than the cloud
somehnacct3757 4y ago
Author has a bias against Microsoft. So do hacker news readers. News of Pluton and its security goals have been readily available since 2020 from reputable hardware sites like Anandtech, or directly from Microsoft themselves. There's nothing new or hidden or surprising about it unless you live to dream up Microsoft conspiracy theories. Many other hardware manufacturers have similar security offerings including Intel and Apple. Microsoft is arguably late to the game here, given their only recent interest in PC hardware. OS integration isn't even new. Macs have been shipping with T1 and T2 chips for over five years. Has the sky fallen on that ecosystem?
- dx034 4y ago
  And that's why Microsoft needs to include such a chip. If we move to a world where security is enforced more and more by hardware, you'll need a device that can participate.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
I can see a situation where "the authorities" decide that, say, the list of people who flew on Epstein's "Lolita express" is "evidence in a pending trial" or "confidential" in the name of "national security," and simply flip a switch to prevent our computers from being able to access any file with particular hashes that they've identified as containing the information. Also, thank God for the Internet Archive.
RantyDave 4y ago
Likewise. I see only potential for enormous hassle reduction if my employer (a bank, currently) can treat its entire compute infrastructure as a honking big cryptographically assured parallel universe.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
It's a big value add for you, as a corporate IT deployer. Outside of corporate IT, what if Microsoft uses this remote attestation to enforce binding non-corporate PCs to a Microsoft account. Some don't have a problem exposing everything to Microsoft's cloud, but Pluto sounds like it could be used to enforce this on a hardware level. If computing devices without bondage to a cloud service are impossible, Windows has no more value proposition for me for personal computing. I'm going to stick with Apple, because at least Apple allows me to turn it all off, off seems to mean off on at least Apple iPhones/iPads (I don't have to check hundreds of weirdly named services, policy settings, scheduled tasks that are all on for some reason), and settings don't seem to randomly sneak on between updates.
oofbey 4y ago
A lot of this rant reminds me of the justification for crypto. The techno-anarchists are terrified of authority they can’t hack around. The fact that some governments abuse their power implies no authority should ever have any power. If we can’t break the rules then the world will end. It’s a slippery slope from content providers getting paid to complete big brother 1984.

ctoth 4y ago

So if I'm understanding this correctly, you'd prefer to live in the world where the Collateral Murder Wikileaks video of journalists being murdered in cold blood was never released because it was hardware locked to the original military system it was found on? Or maybe some large viral video which triggers a social uprising simply won't play. You are seriously so focused on pointless corporate secrets that you would actually consider giving the people in charge of the control over your information stream the ability to decide that something just shouldn't be shown? Because what? It might make discovery for a lawsuit more difficult? It'll make it easier to hide malfeasance? This seems particularly useful if you are trying to pretend that May 35th never happened, for instance. Terrifying, and rather icky.

ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago

What you can install on YOUR pc will be at the sole mercy of microsoft/or maybe someone else.... That's the cusp of it. Not that it can be used for good, but that it sets the way for heavy misuse by large corporations. Wait a few years. Smaller companies won't even be allowed to order high end cpu's. You'll be at 100% mercy of these corporations. If after 2 years they decide to brick your pc, they'll just do it. You think government will help you out here? Lol...

eertvertvbw 4y ago
still waiting on the secure boot lockdown everyone has insisted is coming for the better part of two decades...
- alex7734 4y ago
  The goal is not to prevent you from running Linux, is to make it so that Linux cannot access the content you are interested in. Remote Attestation establishes a root of trust that can be used to verify that all of the software down the line is "approved": - You won't be able to browse sites or use apps with ads unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser that does not block ads. - You won't be able to browse sites with captchas unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser that does not allow bots to interact with the browser. - You won't be able to run Netflix unless you run a 'trusted' device, OS and browser so that you can't record the content. - You won't be able to play online games unless, again, you run a 'trusted' device and OS so that you cannot cheat, or more importantly modify it in any way (why would you purchase skins if you can mod them in?). - You won't be able to use online banking unless you use a trusted OS because banks. Remote Attestation is pretty terrifying and it will be here soon unless it is regulated out of existence, which is unlikely.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    As someone who enjoys hacking, looking at that list sounds terrible. As a regular user, most of that list doesn't sound too bad. Their future devices will automatically have these features enabled, they're not likely to change those settings to "break" their device (from the perspective of Trusted Computing) so they'll have a smooth experience getting into it. - Can't block ads? A lot of average users already don't/don't know how, but this one would probably would affect a lot of people. Probably a bad thing no matter how you slice it. - They'll have a better experience online as they won't be interrupted with captchas. Wouldn't you prefer if you never experienced captchas and logins were smoother and easier? So a wash to a positive for an average user. - This makes it an easier deal for streaming services to let you cache their DRM'd content offline and makes the deals they have to cut with media companies potentially cheaper. Once again they're probably buying off the shelf computing devices which will probably work seamlessly with these restrictions, so they either won't notice anything or potentially get more features than they have now with those services they're already using. I'm not necessarily a fan of DRM but the market has largely spoken, people prefer streaming rather than actually owning the media. - Fewer cheaters in online games sure sounds like a positive to me. - My bank account online is more secure? This is a bad thing?
matthewfcarlson 4y ago
This smacks of fear mongering. The scenario you've outlined is just absurd. Many manufactures have pledged to turn this off by default and be an opt-in model. I'm not disagreeing that laptops given out by corporations for to you to use for work won't be heavily locked down and could be bricked remotely. But most laptops today already come this way from IT.
- nightski 4y ago
  It's not absurd at all. It already happens on a large portion of computing devices in existence (iOS).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dx034 4y ago
Secure chips like this are already in all devices but PCs. And in none of these areas has any of that happened. Quite the opposite, Apple got a fine when they slowed down older devices to save battery (at least what they said). So the government will clearly help out here. And none of these companies has an incentives to stop sales to smaller companies, they make a lot of money with those.
- reedjosh 4y ago
  > So the government will clearly help out here. The government is probably part of the driving factor in building this system. The government probably doesn't want Wikileaks type material to be rendered. There are _so_ many ways the government likely wants to abuse this.
- fsflover 4y ago
  > Quite the opposite, Apple got a fine when they slowed down older devices to save battery But the devices were actually slowed down, so the danger is real.
  - dx034 4y ago
    And Apple had to revert it and got punished for it. What more do you want?
    - fsflover 4y ago
      Good laws should prevent crimes, not just punish for committing them.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Secure chips like this are already in all devices but PCs. And in none of these areas has any of that happened. Ah, that must be why we all have root access and can freely modify or install anything we want on every device we own! Oh, wait, we don't have those things and our non-PC systems are increasingly locked down and routinely do things against the wishes of the people who own them.
- 4y ago

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations and govs to prevent wisthleblowers and journalists to do their job. Or to prevent employees to get evidences of mistreatments in case they need to sue. Because if you look at it, it's basically just a system for information control. And bad actors love that. And of course it will be "for security reasons". Trusting people with a terrible track record to not abuse a massive power in the future, espacially one that can be scaled up with the push of a button once the infrastructure is in place, is not a good bet.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months. Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Have you read the books being banned?
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades. Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator. In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time. > Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist). I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.

squiffsquiff 4y ago

Sure it's fantastic in a corporate environment. Not so fantastic for personal devices. Basically this: https://youtu.be/XgFbqSYdNK4 https://youtu.be/XgFbqSYdNK4

nine_k 4y ago
Well, don't put that on a personal device. It's like your company giving you serious protecting gear to wear while doing your work on a nuclear reactor is a good thing. But having to wear such gear at home is not a popular choice, and should not be required.
- palata 4y ago
  How do you choose what you put in your CPU? What when Windows forces you to have that kind of hardware? You can choose not to wear that gear, but choosing to not use Windows is much more complicated, at least for most people.
  - josephg 4y ago
    I imagine if the proponents of these systems had their way, they'd add remote attestation to websites too. Imagine your bank's website only loading on a "secure" windows environment, non-rooted android phone or an iphone. Once these chips are in everyone's devices, it would be quite easy to add this stuff technically. And in doing so, break the web on non-approved hardware or software (like linux). Edit: Actually on the subject of worst case scenarios: If the trusted computing attestation process was extended through the web browser, it would be possible to build a website which is impossible to scrape or interact with in any unapproved way, from any unapproved device. Eat your heart out Aaron Schwartz.
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      > imagine if the proponents of these systems had their way, they'd add remote attestation to websites too. Imagine your bank's website only loading on a "secure" windows environment, non-rooted android phone or an iphone. Actually, IIUC this is already the case on Android[0]. Some (many? most?) banks/banking apps are rejecting (and/or complaining about) access from rooted phones right now. I can't confirm this personally, as I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears than use a surveillance device^W^W smart phone to do anything financially related. Perhaps someone who uses banking apps on their surveillance device could chime in on that? [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/241012/safetynet-explained-why-android-pay-and-other-apps-dont-work-on-rooted-devices/ https://www.howtogeek.com/241012/safetynet-explained-why-and...

POPOSYS 4y ago

What tools are you using today to realize this scenario? Thanks!

Gh0stRAT 4y ago
The plugin my current employer uses is so well integrated that I don't even know its name. (I suspect it may be developed internally) At a past job, we used Entrust [0] and I'm aware of Virtru [1] as well. Edit: I forgot about Sharepoint, which also sort-of fills the ACL document-sharing niche. (though I'm less certain about whether it uses encryption to enforce its access policies) [0] https://www.entrust.com/ https://www.entrust.com/ [1] https://www.virtru.com/ https://www.virtru.com/

zaptheimpaler 4y ago

The same things that make it good in a corporate environment can make it abusive in a personal machine. By forcing the kernel to be untamperable, Microsoft can arbitrarily enforce ANY policy they choose on your PC. They could spy on every single piece of network communication. They could ban any given software from being able to run on Windows - maybe Chrome, maybe Steam, any competitor at all. They actually could easily enforce laws on banned content too - any given website, book, audio or video could be impossible to consume, and an attempt to try could be reported to Microsoft. They could stream the contents of your display and mic and camera at any time to anyone they choose. There is literally nothing they cannot do with complete control over the kernel. And since the kernel and Windows itself is closed source, there are ways to hide all of it so you would never even know. Security is great but it also goes hand-in-hand with control and surveillance. Every capability to increase security also increases the amount of control those providing the security have.

dane-pgp 4y ago
> They actually could easily enforce laws on banned content too Exactly this. As soon as governments (or lobbyists) discover that this level of control is available to them, they will introduce whatever remaining laws they need, banning E2E encrypted chat apps, or Tor, or bittorrent clients. I suspect that, like civil asset forfeiture, or running commands on botnet-infected devices[0], these actions will have only the thinnest veneer of "due process" applied to them. After all, if your computer is running "illegal" software, why should the government wait for your permission before deleting that software, or even tell you that it had done it after the fact? [0] https://uk.pcmag.com/security/139675/us-disrupts-cyclops-blink-botnet-by-hacking-infected-devices https://uk.pcmag.com/security/139675/us-disrupts-cyclops-bli...
cesarb 4y ago
> They could ban any given software from being able to run on Windows - maybe Chrome, maybe Steam, any competitor at all. IIRC, this was the reason Valve created SteamOS: they feared Microsoft would use their control over Windows so that the only viable software store on PCs would be Microsoft's own store.

wazoox 4y ago

Remember when Snowden and Manning leaked huge troves of secret information about the crimes of the State? Remember when a bunch of journos got their hands on the so-called "Panama papers"? Basically, this will make transparency even harder than it already is. That's a terrible danger for democracy at large. Stalin's wet dream.

jeremyjh 4y ago
Yep that’s why we should ban passwords. /s

npteljes 4y ago

The way I see it: Whatever happens, the system will get abused, and so, I weigh the potential abuses along with the potential benefits. With remote attestation, you put a lot of control in the hands whoever controls the "remote", making the situation very asymmetrical, and so, ripe for centralized abuse. For example, with centralized trust systems, a leak of the signing keys are devastating for the system. For an example, see the DVD key leak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

raxxorraxor 4y ago

Because that doesn't work. 2h before someone complains to IT that he cannot write/read/delete said Word document. Then management says X indeed needs access. Now you have created a maintenance nightmare sourced in rather weird security requirements. Could as well gouge out the eyes of everyone not having a read permission on said document. There are 1001 solution to solve such problems. And as a gigantic bonus it doesn't have to be bound to hardware! User permission management is much easier.

nisegami 4y ago

The difference between ransomware/spyware/extortion/espionage and whistleblowing/free sharing of information is just one of perspective.

pid-1 4y ago

Yeah I totally would like all "doomsday scenarios" in my company, non ironically.

qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago

what's stopping someone from taking photos of your precious document and posting them on 4chan? nothing. there's nothing you can do to stop that.

dane-pgp 4y ago
In corporate and government environments, I imagine that they'll ban employees / civil servants from bringing camera(phone)s to work, and necessarily forbid them working from home. The only question is whether they will trust metal detectors to prevent whistleblowers from bringing in these devices, or if they will rely on strip searches and CCTV.
fsflover 4y ago
Try to scan banknotes with a scanner and you will see.
- anthk 4y ago
  Linux/BSD will do it fine.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    I thought it was in the scanner firmware.
- qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago
  if you mean there are scanners that prevent you from scanning of a banknote, that's another great example of wasting time, money and resources to accomplish nothing
autoexec 4y ago
I can discretely copy GBs of email messages and word docs in a reasonable amount of time, but I couldn't discretely take cell phone pictures of every page of every one of those messages and documents if I had years to do it. You don't always have to prevent something 100% of the time in every possible situation to have a devastating effect on people who want to do that thing.

_8j50 4y ago

It doesn't protect from malicious document leakage: you can still take screenshots or photographs or use a plain txt file. For unintentional leakage, MSIP already does what you are saying this just bakes into hardware where patching/fixes are harder than the cloud

somehnacct3757 4y ago

Author has a bias against Microsoft. So do hacker news readers. News of Pluton and its security goals have been readily available since 2020 from reputable hardware sites like Anandtech, or directly from Microsoft themselves. There's nothing new or hidden or surprising about it unless you live to dream up Microsoft conspiracy theories. Many other hardware manufacturers have similar security offerings including Intel and Apple. Microsoft is arguably late to the game here, given their only recent interest in PC hardware. OS integration isn't even new. Macs have been shipping with T1 and T2 chips for over five years. Has the sky fallen on that ecosystem?

dx034 4y ago
And that's why Microsoft needs to include such a chip. If we move to a world where security is enforced more and more by hardware, you'll need a device that can participate.

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

I can see a situation where "the authorities" decide that, say, the list of people who flew on Epstein's "Lolita express" is "evidence in a pending trial" or "confidential" in the name of "national security," and simply flip a switch to prevent our computers from being able to access any file with particular hashes that they've identified as containing the information. Also, thank God for the Internet Archive.

RantyDave 4y ago

Likewise. I see only potential for enormous hassle reduction if my employer (a bank, currently) can treat its entire compute infrastructure as a honking big cryptographically assured parallel universe.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

It's a big value add for you, as a corporate IT deployer. Outside of corporate IT, what if Microsoft uses this remote attestation to enforce binding non-corporate PCs to a Microsoft account. Some don't have a problem exposing everything to Microsoft's cloud, but Pluto sounds like it could be used to enforce this on a hardware level. If computing devices without bondage to a cloud service are impossible, Windows has no more value proposition for me for personal computing. I'm going to stick with Apple, because at least Apple allows me to turn it all off, off seems to mean off on at least Apple iPhones/iPads (I don't have to check hundreds of weirdly named services, policy settings, scheduled tasks that are all on for some reason), and settings don't seem to randomly sneak on between updates.

oofbey 4y ago

A lot of this rant reminds me of the justification for crypto. The techno-anarchists are terrified of authority they can’t hack around. The fact that some governments abuse their power implies no authority should ever have any power. If we can’t break the rules then the world will end. It’s a slippery slope from content providers getting paid to complete big brother 1984.