13 ms·

Remote Attestation is coming back

320 points by gjsman-1000 4y ago

no_time 4y ago
Where are the pro-consumer advocacy groups from last time? EFF? FSF? They haven't even briefly mentioned the issue at hand.
- dannyw 4y ago
  Both groups are a shell of its former self, either sprouting unjustified clickbait or being silent on the dangers that matter.
- oaiey 4y ago
  For them the battle starts when you cannot add your own root or doing silent attestation. Before this is a reasonable feature.
rektide 4y ago
It's not just a war on general purpose computing, it's not just the mainframe ascendant: the mainframe seems intent on taking over & coopting every computer it can. Google's anti-rooting regime (SafetyNet) has been painful to experience. I'm not sure what's next with the new Play Integrity API but it's hard to have hope users will see wins here or anywhere.
etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
It may make web scraping even more difficult, or anonymity online more broadly.
- capdeck 4y ago
  It will make web scraping impossible. You will not be able to install any software that can do that because it won't be let in to app stores (i.e. it will never get the right keys and permissions, websites won't even respond to it as it won't have attestation). If you somehow try to work around and use your "attested" machine and user id to do this (because websites will require it and your script can't have it, but may be it can run under your user account, for example) - monitoring systems will soon block your account for "suspicious activity" and it will be next to impossible to re-instate because Google and Microsoft don't provide any human support, unless you are some 1mm+ influencer on instagram and will manage to start a rukus on social media. The outlook is quite bleak :-(
heavyset_go 4y ago
This is exactly how 3rd party apps and clients will be locked out of the services they depend on. In a world where AR and "metaverse" platforms take off, this will ensure that they're accessed only from approved clients. This is also how OS, app distributors and platforms will ensure that they get their 30%+ cut of all revenue generated using their products, as well. Similarly, this is how OS providers will ensure that apps built for their platforms can't run on other operating systems. You already can't run SafetyNet-enabled Android apps on other platforms despite Android support existing on Android and Linux.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Windows* and Linux, not Android and Linux.
- echelon 4y ago
  We've gone from open Windows and Linux PCs where you could install anything to walled gardens everywhere. We need to bring the giants down to a level playing field and stop this nonsense.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Completely agree. How could such a thing be achieved?
    - chii 4y ago
      legislation of openness (of protocols used) and interoperability. In the same vein that reverse engineering a compatible, competing product is protected by law. outlaw any use of methods to which clients are discriminated against, including using remote attestation to do so. Similar language has been used in the DMCA legislation to similar effects (aka, software circumvention).
    - narrator 4y ago
      You probably don't want to hear this, but one way it could happen is the Russians will get locked out of all this stuff because of sanctions, so they'll have to create their own separate open world. Yandex will build the open platform like they are releasing big language models and are not scared of the consequences of the bad people, like the Russians, getting ahold of them. Yes, the open platform will be lame compared to what the majors are offering, but Linux on the Desktop was never spectacular either.
hwestiii 4y ago
I'm only here to say that I think Pluton is a completely ridiculous name.
- cesarb 4y ago
  It's a mythological reference: "In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto (Greek: Πλούτων, Ploutōn) was the ruler of the Greek underworld." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_%28mythology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_%28mythology%29). As someone else remarked in a related thread elsewhere, we already have his dog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_%28mythology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_%28mythology%29) as the name of a security protocol.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lordofgibbons 4y ago
I'm convinced Cloudflare is a giant anti-privacy man-in-the-middle attack on the entire web experience. It would be a conspiracy theory to say they were created by a three letter government agency, but if I was running one of those three letter agencies, this is exactly the kind of company I'd setup and control. People just give them their TLS keys lol If you use a VPN or just like browsing in privacy mode, it will make your life as difficult as possible by having you fill out multiple captchas. And even then, it will sometimes not let you through. If you're running a website, please stop using Cloudflare.
- beebmam 4y ago
  How are you "convinced" by something when you have zero evidence for the claim? It sounds like you wish it were true.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- javajosh 4y ago
  While I tend to agree with all of your post, I also have to admit that as a service provider it's nice to be protected from malefactors. If I had to point to the moral problem here its not Cloudflare's existence, but rather the lack of awareness that service providers have about the trade-offs they are making - very similar to the problem we have with "free" services like Google Analytics, or CDN hosting. In each case the programmer is trading away end-user privacy on an ongoing basis for transient developer convenience and a slightly cheaper-to-operate runtime with more failure modes. It's usually a bad trade, I think.
- grishka 4y ago
  I hate Cloudflare with burning passion. Not only is it a US company that centralizes internet infrastructure around itself, it also terminates TLS for way too many websites and sees their cleartext traffic. It then actively meddles with said traffic and punishes you for something you have no control over (your IP address). It's a dystopian nightmare only second to online ads. But ads at least can be blocked — you have zero agency in case of Cloudflare. Whenever I see the "one more step" crap, I just close that tab. Cloudflare needs to stop existing, and it needs to do so yesterday.
fleventynine 4y ago
Unpopular opinion: Hardware-based attestation of the running software is an important security feature, especially in a world where data leaks and identity theft are rampant. Let's say I'm a healthcare provider, and I'm about to send sensitive medical data to a third party vendor. Wouldn't you prefer that this data only be able to be decrypted by a computer that can prove to the world it booted a clean OS image with all the latest security patches installed? If the vendor wants to install some self-built OS that they trust on their computer and not update it for 5 years, that's their business, but I may not want to trust their computer to have access to my personal data. Remote attestation gives more control to the owners of data to dictate how that data is processed on third-party machines (or even their own machines that may have been compromised). This is useful for more than just DRM.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I actually don't disagree with you. As I mention in the article: > I cannot say how much freedom it will take. Arguably, some of the new features will be “good.” Massively reduced cheating in online multiplayer games is something many gamers could appreciate (unless they cheat). Being able to potentially play 4K Blu-ray Discs on your PC again would be convenient. However, I'm more worried about the questions the increased deployment of technology will bring, such as will Linux users be doomed to a CAPTCHA onslaught being the untrusted devices, or worse. Important questions that, unless raised, risk us just "going with the flow" until it is way too late.
  - fleventynine 4y ago
    Unfortunately, it does seem likely that many services will require that your machine run a kernel/web browser signed by an entity they trust before they give you access to what they consider sensitive data. That will suck for those of us who want to build our own kernels/web browsers and use that software to interact with sensitive data from large corporations, but that's their choice to make (IMHO). And it's my choice not to use their service.
    - est31 4y ago
userbinator 4y ago
- googlryas 4y ago
  Is calling anyone who disagrees with you a "corporate mouthpiece" similar to how some people argue anyone who doesn't say "ACAB" is a boot licker? Here's my personal take: No one is forced to use remote attestation merely to use their device. It's only if you want to use some other service. So - if you don't want to play by the requirements of the service, then just don't use the service? It seems pretty simple. There's a country club that I want to eat in, but they require me to wear a suit jacket. I don't want to wear a suit jacket - so what do I do? Simply not eat at that country club and go get food somewhere else that doesn't require a suit jacket, or do I start a PR campaign about how evil suit jackets are, and call anyone who doesn't mind wearing a suit jacket a shill for Big Golf?
  - game-of-throws 4y ago
    The danger is one day there might be no options that don't require remote attestation on Windows and Chrome. Your bank doesn't allow Linux? Choose another bank! ... but what happens once every bank has those requirements?
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      Right, “just don’t use that service” rapidly becomes unreasonable when the service is your bank, the DMV, your university’s web portal, etc.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      You can just bank in some other manner, like in person, or over the phone. You don't have a right to online banking on your mobile device. It's a convenience.
      - dento 4y ago
        Sure, and you can grow all food yourself as well, grocery stores are a convenience as well.
public_defender 4y ago
> Being able to potentially play 4K Blu-ray Discs on your PC again. We cannot do this now because user-hostile vendors have locked the functionality away from us. I think this is a perfect microcosm for the whole tradeoff: lock away the rest of your userspace and we might let you watch the new Batman DVD you already bought.
- kuschku 4y ago
  I can watch 4K bkurays just fine on my PC, with the hacked firmware for my bkuray drive and the proper decryption keys.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > we might let you watch This choice of words perfectly captures the arrogance of these copyright corporations. Who are they to dictate how our computers work just to maintain their irrelevant business model? They're ones who should be playing by our rules, not the other way around. It makes me wish piracy was as bad as they make it out to be, to the point it kills them.
  - public_defender 4y ago
    It feels like they've been trying to shove variations on the celestial jukebox down our throats forever. Supply chain integration is definitely how they could win. I can see it now, DIVX on the desktop.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    Why you assume artists cannot define how you consume media they created? Yes they royally screwed up, but it is their product. They define how they sell it. Just to be clear: I hate how movies are currently distributed.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      > Why you assume It's not an assumption. It's the reality of the information age. The only way to have complete control over information is to not publish it. Once data's out there, there's virtually no way to control what will be done with it. Creators started from a lost position: they want to publish their works and yet they want to somehow control what happens to "their" data. The level of tyranny necessary to accomplish such an end requires the destruction of free computing as we know it. We're already seeing shades of it today: computers that aren't really ours, they only do some corporation or government's bidding. It's only a step away from such digital copyright enforcement nonsense to far more serious matters like cryptography regulation. So I'm not the one assuming anything. It's creators who live under this notion that they own their creations. The truth is public domain is the default state. Intellectual property laws are responsible for bending reality and introducing this assumption that you can even own ideas to begin with. That was workable in the age of printing presses but not in the 21st century where everyone has multiple powerful globally networked computers at home. I for one think computers are a far more important innovation than almost everything humanity has ever created and I don't think enabling creators to continue living under such illusions is important enough to cripple the potential of computers. I want society to eventually reach a post scarcity state in the real world, mirroring the digital world. I don't want corporations creating artificial economies where there are none. All creations are just data, and data is just bits, and bits are just numbers in base two. All intellectual work comes down to humanity discovering a really big unique number. How is it even sane to claim ownership over such a thing?
alexhsamuel 4y ago
The problem isn't the capability of remote attestation. The problem is who's using it, i.e. who's defining what "security" means. As noted above, for a company, "security" often means intentionally inhibiting my freedom, not actually securing anything I care about. We would benefit from a better public discussion of what "security" encompasses. Else, we risk conflating "what MS wants me to do with my computer" with "preventing hackers from stealing my credit card number". Imagine a world where you could submit personal information to a company, with the technological assurance that this information would not leave that company... and you could verify this with remote attestation of the software running on that company's servers.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Imagine a world where you could submit personal information to a company, with the technological assurance that this information would not leave that company... and you could verify this with remote attestation of the software running on that company's servers. That's a classic "road to hell paved with good intentions". The approaching reality is more like: Imagine a world where to be allowed to use the Internet you will be mandated to run certain software, which reports your personal information to a company you are obligated to use, and whose use of that information is absolutely something you do not want. Yes, the problem is indeed "who's using it". Unfortunately you aren't going to be able to decide either, and it will certainly be used against you.
  - alexhsamuel 4y ago
    Indeed! My imagination was tongue-in-cheek; we're never going to get that.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > The problem is who's using it, who's defining what "security" means? Ask that question every time you see the word "security" written. There is no such word as bare security. - security for who? - security from who? - security to what ends? Much of the time security is a closed system, fixed-sum game. My security means your loss of it.
robot 4y ago
Remote attestation or not, "Software freedom" fighters should understand that things happen based on some user base need. Somebody needed this and they added it, whoever needs it doesn't care if they can't run linux on it. If the user cares about running anything else on the hardware, they will add a way to disable the feature. it is all about the user need. if you are a secondary priority user on some hardware, the way to fix it is to focus on becoming important enough to be prioritized instead of fearing some technology will limit things.
- grishka 4y ago
  > things happen based on some user base need Of course not. Things happen based on what investors and developers want. Users are very much secondary. They're a nuisance. If things did really happen based on some user-base need, would we have had Instagram or Facebook in their current form?
  - robot 4y ago
    There is some kind of balance since both of those are free. I'm sure they prioritize user engagement and any loss of users is inadvertent.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    I think so? FB exists in its current form because they're worried about users preferring TikTok
    - grishka 4y ago
      See, it's them being worried about it. Users are totally fine with there being different forms of social media. That is what users want. No one ever asked other social media companies to add TikTok-like functionality — they already have actual TikTok for that.
- deleted 4y ago
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- MereInterest 4y ago
walterbell 4y ago
Prior thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234561 > On-premise, open-source, customer-owned remote attestation servers are possible. Avoid outsourcing integrity verification to 3rd-party clouds. With owner-operated OSS MDM & attestation servers, PCs can have diverse, owner-customized OS and configs, reducing monoculture binary blobs.
- userbinator 4y ago
  PCs can have diverse, owner-customized OS and configs, ...which won't be able to interact with any of the walled gardens which will be enabled by these same technologies.
  - walterbell 4y ago
    That cuts in both directions. If sufficiently large customers run their own attestation servers, the discussion moves from binary yes/no attestation to the details of interoperable measurements, single-purpose OS components and provable security vs vendor lock-in. Walled gardens care about including their large customers, so it's not as simple as locking them out. There is also an ongoing EU legislative effort to mandate digital platform interoperability, which will likely apply to attestation.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      ...and the large customers are going to treat users as the attackers to be secured against, so I don't think that's going to help one bit.
      - walterbell 4y ago
        Many owner-defined OSes would be a bit better than a handful of vendor-defined OSes being imposed on the entire planet. Influencing device owners to provide sensible policies would be the next step, but at least there would be the possibility of competition, and the voices of multiple economic stakeholders. Attestation can also be entirely local, e.g. between a device and a USB key with OSS software that is configured by the owner.
modshatereality 4y ago
This "security" feature confuses the hell out of me. HOW in the sam hill are they going to prove every process running with privileges is in a "secure" state, how can that be possible? Even with constant wasteful memory scans there could be data files that evade micro-brother. So what if it booted in an authentic manner, the user could have tampered with any number of privileged processes, and the second they opened one of THREE web browser engines and ran some unknown 3'rd party advertisement code all bets are off. Not even going to get into malicious firmware/drivers that microsoft will happily sign (see: lenovo superfish, or razer driver menu privilege escalation for recent examples). This is more security theatrics from the same old players, when will it stop? When will all you supporters see what is happening? This is more about operational control than security; it makes me sick to see so-called hackers supporting such an obvious trap. Yall need to dump your shares and join the right side of history because it only gets worse until the weight of oppression ignites a revolution. If you're still holding, think about what is the next "security" frontier after you let them have this? Require every program on the OS, and then every website to sign javascript with cryptographic keys they don't have root control over? GTFO board room members, you're drunk. You want to throw out our freedoms just because microsoft and intel designed a garbage (UEFI) spec that doesn't have a way to physically prevent writes, and damn near requires you to use an ancient FAT filesystem? WHY WOULD YOU TRUST THEM NOT TO BOTCH THIS ONE TOO?
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  "Secure" doesn't mean secure for the user, it means that the interests and revenue streams of platform providers are secured.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
outworlder 4y ago
> Some video games are already requiring Secure Boot and TPM on Windows 11. Great... Just now that we have Proton, Vulkan and other technologies allowing us to seamless run an incredible number of Windows games, we are going backwards and locking down again. That's even assuming we'll be able to run other operating systems. Because why stop at remote attestation? Force secure boot because, hey, noone is using other operating systems anymore since all cloud providers are requiring remote attestation.
- deleted 4y ago
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YeBanKo 4y ago
Attestation is great for cloud computing. Horrible for user devices.
- capdeck 4y ago
  Attestation is great for consolidating power and eliminating competition. As far as the cloud goes - you will only be able to use AWS, Google or Azure, because they will have proper certificates and attestation. Browser support will be built for "big three". For all the others there will be a fee for said certificates which will increase barriers to entry, and there will be even less competition and choice. Existing cloud providers will be the only game in town, just like it is with mobile operators and cable companies.
  - YeBanKo 4y ago
    Here is an example of contact discovery protocol by Signal using remote attestation [1]. Client itself can ensure that the code running on the server is authentic. It is computationally insensitive, but beneficial to the end user. [1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
_8j50 4y ago
Has this ever been challenged by reporting it to the FTC and consumer protection agencies in any country?
edwinjose 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't do this here.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ece 4y ago
DRM is separate from security when the user has control of what exactly they want to run and how much data it may collect. RA is a shortcut companies are taking to market for privacy and security while not mentioning lock-in, network effects and DRM. When pressed, they will ultimately still say privacy and security aren't 100%. That said, could a Linux distro come out with the same thing as these PATs using IMA/EVM/TPM/ME/PSP? Probably (Graphene has some support for RA, but I haven't looked in depth), and as long as Cloudflare had multi-platform support, and the implementation still allows letting me have control, I wouldn't see the problem. Bugs can be exploited by anyone with the know how, and I see no reason why I should give up control because companies want to take a shortcut instead of designing proper systems. We see Epic has already said they won't support Linux because of anti-cheat, so that scapegoat exists, but there are other games that didn't go that route! Porting costs, and size of install base are real excuses among others, but anti-cheat is a BS excuse. No shortcuts by companies and no short cuts by platforms, but we know lock-in, network effects and DRM are too good to let go.
- ece 4y ago
  To be clear, any OS can attest they're running signed kernel/modules, it says nothing about how determined an attacker is. If you just want some confidence a user isn't a bad actor, there are other ways of doing that.
tjpnz 4y ago
Why do I need Remote Attestation to enjoy 4K content when I can more conveniently pirate it?
- taco9999 4y ago
  See: https://xkcd.com/488/ https://xkcd.com/488/ Also, since a lot of different movie streaming services (e.g. Hulu, Disney+) have launched, a lot of content has moved off of Netflix, leading to a higher piracy rate.
django_hero 4y ago
I totally agree. I don't want Microsoft controlling my devices. If Cloudflare starts giving this feature easily like by a click of a button, almost all website will start using it. Making web more difficult and useless to navigate.
bunnie 4y ago
Is there any way we can make Remote Attestation providers liable for any losses incurred while using their services? Can we make it so that banks, record companies, and individuals can sue Microsoft or Google if their system doesn't deliver on the promise? If we still see cheating in on-line gaming even though all machines are attested, can we we get our money back? I feel like part of the problem is that Remote Attestation providers get to have their cake and eat it too: they make a theme park, set up boundaries, and charge admission under the premise that it's safer to play in their walled garden than in a public park. But if a bad actor slips through their gate and picks a few pockets or kidnaps a couple children, the operators get to say "not our problem, our services have no warranty -- read the EULA". I feel like in the real world, if a park operator explicitly bills itself as "a safe place to play" it's their problem if someone goes on a crime spree on their property -- there is some duty to deliver on the advertised safety promise. But somehow, in the software world people can control admission, control what you do and somehow have no liability if things still go off the rails. It's just a sucker's game. Of course, I'd rather not see remote attestation happen, but maybe part of the reason it keeps creeping back is exactly because there is zero legal downside to making security promises that can't be kept, but incredible market advantages if they can sucker enough people to believe in the scheme.
- deleted 4y ago
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- saurik 4y ago
  > If we still see cheating in on-line gaming even though all machines are attested, can we we get our money back? The concept of remote attestation isn't somehow safer if it works perfectly, and it isn't clear to me that this is actually impossible to build (within an acceptable and specified liability constraint) as opposed to merely exceedingly difficult. I do relish the schadenfreude, though ;P. > Of course, I'd rather not see remote attestation happen... Interestingly, the CEO of MobileCoin told me earlier this year that they were "going deeper on discussions with [you] to design a fully open source enclave specifically for [their] use case" (which, for anyone who doesn't know much about this, currently relies on remote attestation and encrypted RAM from Intel SGX to allow mobile devices to offload privacy-sensitive computations and database lookups to their server). I wrote a long letter to you a few days later in the hope of (after verifying with you whether that was even true or not) convincing you to stop, but then decided I should probably try to talk to Kyle and/or Cory first on my way to you (and even later ended up deciding I was stressed out about too many things at the time to deal with it)... does this mean you actually aren't, and we are all safe? ;P (I guess it could be the case that this special design somehow doesn't involve any form of remote attestation--as while my core issue with their product is their reliance on such, I went back through the entire argument and I didn't use that term with THEM--in which case I'm very curious how that could actually work.)
Williambd 4y ago
[flagged]
ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
> Published by Gabriel Sieben > Gabriel Sieben is a 20-year-old software developer from St. Paul, MN, who enjoys experimenting with computers and loves to share his various technology-related projects. He owns and runs this blog, and is a traditional Catholic. Well isn't that something, someone who writes blog posts proselytizing the importance of individual freedoms while also making sure his readers know he's a "traditional Catholic". The level of cognitive dissonance is impressive.
naikrovek 4y ago
without any negative meaning whatsoever, I wish I had 1% of the confidence today that this 20-year old person has. I do not agree with this person's conclusions on any article they've self-promoted on this site, but their self-confidence is unparalleled.
UltraViolence 4y ago
I really wonder if we need to be concerned at all about this. In the end people are always able to vote with their feet. We've seen this happening with SACD (Super Audio CD), the successor to the CD which had unbreakable encryption. People ended up simply ignoring it. Today, you can buy HiRes audio files without DRM of any kind online. These files have mostly been ripped from SACD's with their unbreakable encryption. The record companies thought they might as well sell them online, lest they become worthless. If people feel they're being hampered too much by Windows' DRM they'll most likely switch over to some RISC-V processor from some Chinese company. I'll bet you that if that happens Microsoft will flush Pluton down the toilet before you can say "Clippy." It simply isn't worth it to them. Sure they want to lock in their customers even more, but as soon as they start leaving in droves they'll swiftly move to stem the outflow.
- account42 4y ago
  The only reason SACD failed and you can buy DRM-free music today is because people were concerned an pushed back hard against that crap.

320 points by gjsman-1000 4y ago

Where are the pro-consumer advocacy groups from last time? EFF? FSF? They haven't even briefly mentioned the issue at hand.

dannyw 4y ago
Both groups are a shell of its former self, either sprouting unjustified clickbait or being silent on the dangers that matter.
oaiey 4y ago
For them the battle starts when you cannot add your own root or doing silent attestation. Before this is a reasonable feature.

rektide 4y ago

It's not just a war on general purpose computing, it's not just the mainframe ascendant: the mainframe seems intent on taking over & coopting every computer it can. Google's anti-rooting regime (SafetyNet) has been painful to experience. I'm not sure what's next with the new Play Integrity API but it's hard to have hope users will see wins here or anywhere.

etaioinshrdlu 4y ago

It may make web scraping even more difficult, or anonymity online more broadly.

capdeck 4y ago
It will make web scraping impossible. You will not be able to install any software that can do that because it won't be let in to app stores (i.e. it will never get the right keys and permissions, websites won't even respond to it as it won't have attestation). If you somehow try to work around and use your "attested" machine and user id to do this (because websites will require it and your script can't have it, but may be it can run under your user account, for example) - monitoring systems will soon block your account for "suspicious activity" and it will be next to impossible to re-instate because Google and Microsoft don't provide any human support, unless you are some 1mm+ influencer on instagram and will manage to start a rukus on social media. The outlook is quite bleak :-(

heavyset_go 4y ago

This is exactly how 3rd party apps and clients will be locked out of the services they depend on. In a world where AR and "metaverse" platforms take off, this will ensure that they're accessed only from approved clients. This is also how OS, app distributors and platforms will ensure that they get their 30%+ cut of all revenue generated using their products, as well. Similarly, this is how OS providers will ensure that apps built for their platforms can't run on other operating systems. You already can't run SafetyNet-enabled Android apps on other platforms despite Android support existing on Android and Linux.

heavyset_go 4y ago
Windows* and Linux, not Android and Linux.
echelon 4y ago
We've gone from open Windows and Linux PCs where you could install anything to walled gardens everywhere. We need to bring the giants down to a level playing field and stop this nonsense.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Completely agree. How could such a thing be achieved?
  - chii 4y ago
    legislation of openness (of protocols used) and interoperability. In the same vein that reverse engineering a compatible, competing product is protected by law. outlaw any use of methods to which clients are discriminated against, including using remote attestation to do so. Similar language has been used in the DMCA legislation to similar effects (aka, software circumvention).
  - narrator 4y ago
    You probably don't want to hear this, but one way it could happen is the Russians will get locked out of all this stuff because of sanctions, so they'll have to create their own separate open world. Yandex will build the open platform like they are releasing big language models and are not scared of the consequences of the bad people, like the Russians, getting ahold of them. Yes, the open platform will be lame compared to what the majors are offering, but Linux on the Desktop was never spectacular either.

hwestiii 4y ago

I'm only here to say that I think Pluton is a completely ridiculous name.

cesarb 4y ago
It's a mythological reference: "In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto (Greek: Πλούτων, Ploutōn) was the ruler of the Greek underworld." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_%28mythology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_%28mythology%29). As someone else remarked in a related thread elsewhere, we already have his dog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_%28mythology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_%28mythology%29) as the name of a security protocol.
deleted 4y ago
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lordofgibbons 4y ago

I'm convinced Cloudflare is a giant anti-privacy man-in-the-middle attack on the entire web experience. It would be a conspiracy theory to say they were created by a three letter government agency, but if I was running one of those three letter agencies, this is exactly the kind of company I'd setup and control. People just give them their TLS keys lol If you use a VPN or just like browsing in privacy mode, it will make your life as difficult as possible by having you fill out multiple captchas. And even then, it will sometimes not let you through. If you're running a website, please stop using Cloudflare.

beebmam 4y ago
How are you "convinced" by something when you have zero evidence for the claim? It sounds like you wish it were true.
deleted 4y ago
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javajosh 4y ago
While I tend to agree with all of your post, I also have to admit that as a service provider it's nice to be protected from malefactors. If I had to point to the moral problem here its not Cloudflare's existence, but rather the lack of awareness that service providers have about the trade-offs they are making - very similar to the problem we have with "free" services like Google Analytics, or CDN hosting. In each case the programmer is trading away end-user privacy on an ongoing basis for transient developer convenience and a slightly cheaper-to-operate runtime with more failure modes. It's usually a bad trade, I think.
grishka 4y ago
I hate Cloudflare with burning passion. Not only is it a US company that centralizes internet infrastructure around itself, it also terminates TLS for way too many websites and sees their cleartext traffic. It then actively meddles with said traffic and punishes you for something you have no control over (your IP address). It's a dystopian nightmare only second to online ads. But ads at least can be blocked — you have zero agency in case of Cloudflare. Whenever I see the "one more step" crap, I just close that tab. Cloudflare needs to stop existing, and it needs to do so yesterday.

fleventynine 4y ago

Unpopular opinion: Hardware-based attestation of the running software is an important security feature, especially in a world where data leaks and identity theft are rampant. Let's say I'm a healthcare provider, and I'm about to send sensitive medical data to a third party vendor. Wouldn't you prefer that this data only be able to be decrypted by a computer that can prove to the world it booted a clean OS image with all the latest security patches installed? If the vendor wants to install some self-built OS that they trust on their computer and not update it for 5 years, that's their business, but I may not want to trust their computer to have access to my personal data. Remote attestation gives more control to the owners of data to dictate how that data is processed on third-party machines (or even their own machines that may have been compromised). This is useful for more than just DRM.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
I actually don't disagree with you. As I mention in the article: > I cannot say how much freedom it will take. Arguably, some of the new features will be “good.” Massively reduced cheating in online multiplayer games is something many gamers could appreciate (unless they cheat). Being able to potentially play 4K Blu-ray Discs on your PC again would be convenient. However, I'm more worried about the questions the increased deployment of technology will bring, such as will Linux users be doomed to a CAPTCHA onslaught being the untrusted devices, or worse. Important questions that, unless raised, risk us just "going with the flow" until it is way too late.
- fleventynine 4y ago
  Unfortunately, it does seem likely that many services will require that your machine run a kernel/web browser signed by an entity they trust before they give you access to what they consider sensitive data. That will suck for those of us who want to build our own kernels/web browsers and use that software to interact with sensitive data from large corporations, but that's their choice to make (IMHO). And it's my choice not to use their service.
  - est31 4y ago

userbinator 4y ago

googlryas 4y ago
Is calling anyone who disagrees with you a "corporate mouthpiece" similar to how some people argue anyone who doesn't say "ACAB" is a boot licker? Here's my personal take: No one is forced to use remote attestation merely to use their device. It's only if you want to use some other service. So - if you don't want to play by the requirements of the service, then just don't use the service? It seems pretty simple. There's a country club that I want to eat in, but they require me to wear a suit jacket. I don't want to wear a suit jacket - so what do I do? Simply not eat at that country club and go get food somewhere else that doesn't require a suit jacket, or do I start a PR campaign about how evil suit jackets are, and call anyone who doesn't mind wearing a suit jacket a shill for Big Golf?
- game-of-throws 4y ago
  The danger is one day there might be no options that don't require remote attestation on Windows and Chrome. Your bank doesn't allow Linux? Choose another bank! ... but what happens once every bank has those requirements?
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Right, “just don’t use that service” rapidly becomes unreasonable when the service is your bank, the DMV, your university’s web portal, etc.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    You can just bank in some other manner, like in person, or over the phone. You don't have a right to online banking on your mobile device. It's a convenience.
    - dento 4y ago
      Sure, and you can grow all food yourself as well, grocery stores are a convenience as well.

public_defender 4y ago

> Being able to potentially play 4K Blu-ray Discs on your PC again. We cannot do this now because user-hostile vendors have locked the functionality away from us. I think this is a perfect microcosm for the whole tradeoff: lock away the rest of your userspace and we might let you watch the new Batman DVD you already bought.

kuschku 4y ago
I can watch 4K bkurays just fine on my PC, with the hacked firmware for my bkuray drive and the proper decryption keys.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> we might let you watch This choice of words perfectly captures the arrogance of these copyright corporations. Who are they to dictate how our computers work just to maintain their irrelevant business model? They're ones who should be playing by our rules, not the other way around. It makes me wish piracy was as bad as they make it out to be, to the point it kills them.
- public_defender 4y ago
  It feels like they've been trying to shove variations on the celestial jukebox down our throats forever. Supply chain integration is definitely how they could win. I can see it now, DIVX on the desktop.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Why you assume artists cannot define how you consume media they created? Yes they royally screwed up, but it is their product. They define how they sell it. Just to be clear: I hate how movies are currently distributed.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > Why you assume It's not an assumption. It's the reality of the information age. The only way to have complete control over information is to not publish it. Once data's out there, there's virtually no way to control what will be done with it. Creators started from a lost position: they want to publish their works and yet they want to somehow control what happens to "their" data. The level of tyranny necessary to accomplish such an end requires the destruction of free computing as we know it. We're already seeing shades of it today: computers that aren't really ours, they only do some corporation or government's bidding. It's only a step away from such digital copyright enforcement nonsense to far more serious matters like cryptography regulation. So I'm not the one assuming anything. It's creators who live under this notion that they own their creations. The truth is public domain is the default state. Intellectual property laws are responsible for bending reality and introducing this assumption that you can even own ideas to begin with. That was workable in the age of printing presses but not in the 21st century where everyone has multiple powerful globally networked computers at home. I for one think computers are a far more important innovation than almost everything humanity has ever created and I don't think enabling creators to continue living under such illusions is important enough to cripple the potential of computers. I want society to eventually reach a post scarcity state in the real world, mirroring the digital world. I don't want corporations creating artificial economies where there are none. All creations are just data, and data is just bits, and bits are just numbers in base two. All intellectual work comes down to humanity discovering a really big unique number. How is it even sane to claim ownership over such a thing?

alexhsamuel 4y ago

The problem isn't the capability of remote attestation. The problem is who's using it, i.e. who's defining what "security" means. As noted above, for a company, "security" often means intentionally inhibiting my freedom, not actually securing anything I care about. We would benefit from a better public discussion of what "security" encompasses. Else, we risk conflating "what MS wants me to do with my computer" with "preventing hackers from stealing my credit card number". Imagine a world where you could submit personal information to a company, with the technological assurance that this information would not leave that company... and you could verify this with remote attestation of the software running on that company's servers.

userbinator 4y ago
Imagine a world where you could submit personal information to a company, with the technological assurance that this information would not leave that company... and you could verify this with remote attestation of the software running on that company's servers. That's a classic "road to hell paved with good intentions". The approaching reality is more like: Imagine a world where to be allowed to use the Internet you will be mandated to run certain software, which reports your personal information to a company you are obligated to use, and whose use of that information is absolutely something you do not want. Yes, the problem is indeed "who's using it". Unfortunately you aren't going to be able to decide either, and it will certainly be used against you.
- alexhsamuel 4y ago
  Indeed! My imagination was tongue-in-cheek; we're never going to get that.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> The problem is who's using it, who's defining what "security" means? Ask that question every time you see the word "security" written. There is no such word as bare security. - security for who? - security from who? - security to what ends? Much of the time security is a closed system, fixed-sum game. My security means your loss of it.

robot 4y ago

Remote attestation or not, "Software freedom" fighters should understand that things happen based on some user base need. Somebody needed this and they added it, whoever needs it doesn't care if they can't run linux on it. If the user cares about running anything else on the hardware, they will add a way to disable the feature. it is all about the user need. if you are a secondary priority user on some hardware, the way to fix it is to focus on becoming important enough to be prioritized instead of fearing some technology will limit things.

grishka 4y ago
> things happen based on some user base need Of course not. Things happen based on what investors and developers want. Users are very much secondary. They're a nuisance. If things did really happen based on some user-base need, would we have had Instagram or Facebook in their current form?
- robot 4y ago
  There is some kind of balance since both of those are free. I'm sure they prioritize user engagement and any loss of users is inadvertent.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  I think so? FB exists in its current form because they're worried about users preferring TikTok
  - grishka 4y ago
    See, it's them being worried about it. Users are totally fine with there being different forms of social media. That is what users want. No one ever asked other social media companies to add TikTok-like functionality — they already have actual TikTok for that.
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MereInterest 4y ago

walterbell 4y ago

Prior thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234561 > On-premise, open-source, customer-owned remote attestation servers are possible. Avoid outsourcing integrity verification to 3rd-party clouds. With owner-operated OSS MDM & attestation servers, PCs can have diverse, owner-customized OS and configs, reducing monoculture binary blobs.

userbinator 4y ago
PCs can have diverse, owner-customized OS and configs, ...which won't be able to interact with any of the walled gardens which will be enabled by these same technologies.
- walterbell 4y ago
  That cuts in both directions. If sufficiently large customers run their own attestation servers, the discussion moves from binary yes/no attestation to the details of interoperable measurements, single-purpose OS components and provable security vs vendor lock-in. Walled gardens care about including their large customers, so it's not as simple as locking them out. There is also an ongoing EU legislative effort to mandate digital platform interoperability, which will likely apply to attestation.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    ...and the large customers are going to treat users as the attackers to be secured against, so I don't think that's going to help one bit.
    - walterbell 4y ago
      Many owner-defined OSes would be a bit better than a handful of vendor-defined OSes being imposed on the entire planet. Influencing device owners to provide sensible policies would be the next step, but at least there would be the possibility of competition, and the voices of multiple economic stakeholders. Attestation can also be entirely local, e.g. between a device and a USB key with OSS software that is configured by the owner.

modshatereality 4y ago

This "security" feature confuses the hell out of me. HOW in the sam hill are they going to prove every process running with privileges is in a "secure" state, how can that be possible? Even with constant wasteful memory scans there could be data files that evade micro-brother. So what if it booted in an authentic manner, the user could have tampered with any number of privileged processes, and the second they opened one of THREE web browser engines and ran some unknown 3'rd party advertisement code all bets are off. Not even going to get into malicious firmware/drivers that microsoft will happily sign (see: lenovo superfish, or razer driver menu privilege escalation for recent examples). This is more security theatrics from the same old players, when will it stop? When will all you supporters see what is happening? This is more about operational control than security; it makes me sick to see so-called hackers supporting such an obvious trap. Yall need to dump your shares and join the right side of history because it only gets worse until the weight of oppression ignites a revolution. If you're still holding, think about what is the next "security" frontier after you let them have this? Require every program on the OS, and then every website to sign javascript with cryptographic keys they don't have root control over? GTFO board room members, you're drunk. You want to throw out our freedoms just because microsoft and intel designed a garbage (UEFI) spec that doesn't have a way to physically prevent writes, and damn near requires you to use an ancient FAT filesystem? WHY WOULD YOU TRUST THEM NOT TO BOTCH THIS ONE TOO?

heavyset_go 4y ago
"Secure" doesn't mean secure for the user, it means that the interests and revenue streams of platform providers are secured.
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outworlder 4y ago

> Some video games are already requiring Secure Boot and TPM on Windows 11. Great... Just now that we have Proton, Vulkan and other technologies allowing us to seamless run an incredible number of Windows games, we are going backwards and locking down again. That's even assuming we'll be able to run other operating systems. Because why stop at remote attestation? Force secure boot because, hey, noone is using other operating systems anymore since all cloud providers are requiring remote attestation.

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YeBanKo 4y ago

Attestation is great for cloud computing. Horrible for user devices.

capdeck 4y ago
Attestation is great for consolidating power and eliminating competition. As far as the cloud goes - you will only be able to use AWS, Google or Azure, because they will have proper certificates and attestation. Browser support will be built for "big three". For all the others there will be a fee for said certificates which will increase barriers to entry, and there will be even less competition and choice. Existing cloud providers will be the only game in town, just like it is with mobile operators and cable companies.
- YeBanKo 4y ago
  Here is an example of contact discovery protocol by Signal using remote attestation [1]. Client itself can ensure that the code running on the server is authentic. It is computationally insensitive, but beneficial to the end user. [1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

_8j50 4y ago

Has this ever been challenged by reporting it to the FTC and consumer protection agencies in any country?

edwinjose 4y ago

dang 4y ago
Please don't do this here.

deleted 4y ago

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ece 4y ago

DRM is separate from security when the user has control of what exactly they want to run and how much data it may collect. RA is a shortcut companies are taking to market for privacy and security while not mentioning lock-in, network effects and DRM. When pressed, they will ultimately still say privacy and security aren't 100%. That said, could a Linux distro come out with the same thing as these PATs using IMA/EVM/TPM/ME/PSP? Probably (Graphene has some support for RA, but I haven't looked in depth), and as long as Cloudflare had multi-platform support, and the implementation still allows letting me have control, I wouldn't see the problem. Bugs can be exploited by anyone with the know how, and I see no reason why I should give up control because companies want to take a shortcut instead of designing proper systems. We see Epic has already said they won't support Linux because of anti-cheat, so that scapegoat exists, but there are other games that didn't go that route! Porting costs, and size of install base are real excuses among others, but anti-cheat is a BS excuse. No shortcuts by companies and no short cuts by platforms, but we know lock-in, network effects and DRM are too good to let go.

ece 4y ago
To be clear, any OS can attest they're running signed kernel/modules, it says nothing about how determined an attacker is. If you just want some confidence a user isn't a bad actor, there are other ways of doing that.

tjpnz 4y ago

Why do I need Remote Attestation to enjoy 4K content when I can more conveniently pirate it?

taco9999 4y ago
See: https://xkcd.com/488/ https://xkcd.com/488/ Also, since a lot of different movie streaming services (e.g. Hulu, Disney+) have launched, a lot of content has moved off of Netflix, leading to a higher piracy rate.

django_hero 4y ago

I totally agree. I don't want Microsoft controlling my devices. If Cloudflare starts giving this feature easily like by a click of a button, almost all website will start using it. Making web more difficult and useless to navigate.

bunnie 4y ago

Is there any way we can make Remote Attestation providers liable for any losses incurred while using their services? Can we make it so that banks, record companies, and individuals can sue Microsoft or Google if their system doesn't deliver on the promise? If we still see cheating in on-line gaming even though all machines are attested, can we we get our money back? I feel like part of the problem is that Remote Attestation providers get to have their cake and eat it too: they make a theme park, set up boundaries, and charge admission under the premise that it's safer to play in their walled garden than in a public park. But if a bad actor slips through their gate and picks a few pockets or kidnaps a couple children, the operators get to say "not our problem, our services have no warranty -- read the EULA". I feel like in the real world, if a park operator explicitly bills itself as "a safe place to play" it's their problem if someone goes on a crime spree on their property -- there is some duty to deliver on the advertised safety promise. But somehow, in the software world people can control admission, control what you do and somehow have no liability if things still go off the rails. It's just a sucker's game. Of course, I'd rather not see remote attestation happen, but maybe part of the reason it keeps creeping back is exactly because there is zero legal downside to making security promises that can't be kept, but incredible market advantages if they can sucker enough people to believe in the scheme.

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saurik 4y ago
> If we still see cheating in on-line gaming even though all machines are attested, can we we get our money back? The concept of remote attestation isn't somehow safer if it works perfectly, and it isn't clear to me that this is actually impossible to build (within an acceptable and specified liability constraint) as opposed to merely exceedingly difficult. I do relish the schadenfreude, though ;P. > Of course, I'd rather not see remote attestation happen... Interestingly, the CEO of MobileCoin told me earlier this year that they were "going deeper on discussions with [you] to design a fully open source enclave specifically for [their] use case" (which, for anyone who doesn't know much about this, currently relies on remote attestation and encrypted RAM from Intel SGX to allow mobile devices to offload privacy-sensitive computations and database lookups to their server). I wrote a long letter to you a few days later in the hope of (after verifying with you whether that was even true or not) convincing you to stop, but then decided I should probably try to talk to Kyle and/or Cory first on my way to you (and even later ended up deciding I was stressed out about too many things at the time to deal with it)... does this mean you actually aren't, and we are all safe? ;P (I guess it could be the case that this special design somehow doesn't involve any form of remote attestation--as while my core issue with their product is their reliance on such, I went back through the entire argument and I didn't use that term with THEM--in which case I'm very curious how that could actually work.)

Williambd 4y ago

[flagged]

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

> Published by Gabriel Sieben > Gabriel Sieben is a 20-year-old software developer from St. Paul, MN, who enjoys experimenting with computers and loves to share his various technology-related projects. He owns and runs this blog, and is a traditional Catholic. Well isn't that something, someone who writes blog posts proselytizing the importance of individual freedoms while also making sure his readers know he's a "traditional Catholic". The level of cognitive dissonance is impressive.

naikrovek 4y ago

without any negative meaning whatsoever, I wish I had 1% of the confidence today that this 20-year old person has. I do not agree with this person's conclusions on any article they've self-promoted on this site, but their self-confidence is unparalleled.

UltraViolence 4y ago

I really wonder if we need to be concerned at all about this. In the end people are always able to vote with their feet. We've seen this happening with SACD (Super Audio CD), the successor to the CD which had unbreakable encryption. People ended up simply ignoring it. Today, you can buy HiRes audio files without DRM of any kind online. These files have mostly been ripped from SACD's with their unbreakable encryption. The record companies thought they might as well sell them online, lest they become worthless. If people feel they're being hampered too much by Windows' DRM they'll most likely switch over to some RISC-V processor from some Chinese company. I'll bet you that if that happens Microsoft will flush Pluton down the toilet before you can say "Clippy." It simply isn't worth it to them. Sure they want to lock in their customers even more, but as soon as they start leaving in droves they'll swiftly move to stem the outflow.

account42 4y ago
The only reason SACD failed and you can buy DRM-free music today is because people were concerned an pushed back hard against that crap.