23 ms·

Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

• ChuckMcM 5mo ago
  This is a really good thread on why this technology is becoming a problem for "open" anything. The argument "we can create our own separate web" is fine until all of your services are behind the web that locks you into owning a Google approved or Apple approved mobile device.
  • samplifier 5mo ago
    Are there enough of us to run our own country? It makes me feel dumb, but this is a serious question.
    • hnlmorg 5mo ago
      I’m not sure why you’re asking this question, but you can run a country as a population of 1 (ie just yourself) if you wanted. The problem being raised isn’t due to the size of the country though. It’s the size of the company (ie Apple and Google)
      • deleted 5mo ago
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    • voakbasda 5mo ago
      Where would you do that? Realistically, the question is one that cannot even be asked safely: are there enough of us to overthrow the existing systems and replace them with something better? The answer to either question, really, is no. The powers that be have systematically implemented policies that keep us divided to prevent that eventual outcome.
      • mwwaters 5mo ago
        The “enough of us” is at least a majority of voters agreeing. I’m not sure what the alternative to that is.
      • userbinator 5mo ago
        In terms of headcount, and especially those who are working on this hostile stuff, Big Tech is not even that big compared to the rest of the population.
    • otterley 5mo ago
      If you live in a democracy, you already do run your own country. Vote accordingly. Get involved in politics.
      • daishi55 5mo ago
        There are mountains of academic research showing that even in “democracies”, public opinion rarely translates into policy (by design).
        • zozbot234 5mo ago
          The problem with that argument is that there really is no such thing as public opinion at scale. You can poll people/the general public on just about any issue and the answers are going to differ massively depending on framing effects. In the end, it's hardly better than just flipping a coin.
          • ryandrake 5mo ago
            Even if public opinion is unified, if they want something to happen, they are just going to ignore the public and do it anyway. Like the recent cases of data enter projects where they just ignore the public voting against them. Democracy’s weakness it it requires people to follow the rules, but if nobody voluntarily follows the rules, then we don’t really have one.
            • otterley 5mo ago
              > Like the recent cases of data enter projects where they just ignore the public voting against them Do you have an example? And was this a binding or non-binding vote?
              • ryandrake 5mo ago
                https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/michigan-towns-rush-to-block-ai-data-centers-after-16-billion-stargate-project-overrode-local-opposition https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/michigan-towns-ru...
    • throw7 5mo ago
      We already have a republic. If we can keep it.
    • IdiotSavage 5mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation
    • riedel 5mo ago
      The question is rather: can political parties develop a vision beyond libertarian views or full state control on the other side. I feel that we need a better political consensus on a free society that puts the monopoly of force in the hand of democratic legitimate forces. I currently feel that all digital violence lies in the hands of a few corporations. And at the same time there is politician that like this because they can through this proxy can indirectly execute control without any political legitimacy. Sorry, I do not believe in markets as guarantees for freedom. I have read too much dystopian sci-fi for that.
    • deleted 5mo ago
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    • deleted 5mo ago
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    • epistasis 5mo ago
      Who is the "us" in your question? Theoretically in democracies we should be able to decide this, if we aren't being distracted from real political questions with the culture war stuff that divides the public's attention and divides neighbors from each other. Any new country will have these same issues, eventually, and probably a lot more that don't seem obvious on the surface. Fighting against these sorts of monopolies seems far more likely if we can figure out what forces inside the EU and the US are driving these changes and find a way to educated the public, interest groups, and politicians about what's going on.
    • thomastjeffery 5mo ago
      Ideally, we just run our own lives, collaboratively. That's the anarchist default position that we all start in. What we really need is to meaningfully participate outside of the hierarchical monopolistic systems that demand our participation. That doesn't just mean that we create and hang out in distributed networks: it also means that we make and do interesting shit there, too. The biggest hurdle I see is that we only really use uncensored spaces to do the shit that would otherwise be censored. We don't use distributed networks to plan a party with grandma, or bitch about the next series of layoffs. We don't use distributed networks to share scientific discovery or art. I think part of the solution is to make software that is better at facilitating those kind of interactions, and the other part of the solution is actually fucking using it. How many of us are only waiting for the first part?
      • nullc 5mo ago
        but what if the alternatives are fundamentally worse? Turns out centralization has a lot of advantages. I think it's an error to demand the alternatives be as good-- that might not even always be possible. But even if they're less good they're usually still better than anything we could have imagined decades ago-- they're good enough to use. And that should be enough because we shouldn't consider handing control of ourselves to third parties to be an acceptable choice at all.
        • thomastjeffery 5mo ago
          Let's dig into what makes them worse, and see what we can do about it. I think the main struggle is moderation. Moderation requires a hierarchy, which is much more compatible with a centralized model. I'm thinking that curation would be a good alternative. Rather than authoritatively silencing unwanted content, just categorize it well enough for users to filter what they want.
          • iamnothere 5mo ago
            I agree with you, but many people have yet to understand that content they disagree with will continue to exist, no matter what, and central gatekeepers are not helpful in eliminating that content. The fucking “nazi bar” analogy has ruined an entire generation. You would think after centuries of trying to stamp out competing ideas, humans would finally come to terms with the fact that it cannot be done. Small curated groups are the only way to enforce ideological orthodoxy. You cannot force it on the public, nor can you punish the public for holding bad ideas without creating blowback and resistance.
    • dvdkon 5mo ago
      I'm convinced that in the billions of people living on Earth, there are a couple million that could agree on things that currently divide countries, like this. Sadly they're unlikely to ever be able to gather together in a single state. The status quo is nation-states in roughly their post-WW2 borders, and it's fiercely protected. The upside is stability and fewer wars, the downside is that the only way to try anything new is to co-opt an existing country. Adding to that, most countries are ethnostates that would prefer to have only a small percentage of their population be migrants. It's an easy way toward social cohesion, you just stay roughly where you're born, with people who were also born there and share the same cultural background. As we can see, it's not ideal - two lifelong neighbours can easily hold completely opposite moral values.
    • palata 5mo ago
      The problem with "us" is that it's not enough to agree on one small question ("is hardware attestation good or bad") to happily live together in our own country. "We" have a wide variety of opinions about pretty much everything. In other words, "we" exist only to fight against this one thing we disagree with. And even there, we probably don't all agree on how to fight it or what to do instead.
    • deleted 5mo ago
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  • luckylion 5mo ago
    Wouldn't the argument be that you'd build separate copies of those services as well? Granted, for banking or government-interactions that isn't feasible, but wouldn't it for many other things? It would likely be more expensive given that the work to build something still needs to be done and the cost is distributed among fewer shoulders and the lower complexity since you don't need to build ad-tech doesn't make up for that, but I suppose that's a bit like quality food. Hardware will be more difficult.
    • chii 5mo ago
      > Wouldn't the argument be that you'd build separate copies of those services as well? you can't if the service requires the network effect to function well, if at all. Look at blusky and all that alternatives, look at the pitiful attempts at making a youtube alternative, etc.
  • skybrian 5mo ago
    Yes, it requires you to have an approved device for certain tasks. But you can own multiple devices. You can use an approved device specifically for banking or Netflix and whatever device you like for all your other tasks. Maybe you could use an approved device (a Yubikey?) to authenticate your other devices? Also, governments should be leaning on them to approve more devices.
  • Someone 5mo ago
    IMO, it would be better if they removed the claim “It doesn't provide a useful security feature” because, even if it does, the collateral damage of making non-Google, non-Apple OSes second class citizens remains, and that is the main problem.
    • thomastjeffery 5mo ago
      That's one of the two main claims made by in favor of hardware attestation; so it makes sense to argue against it. Of course, the other claim (that categories of people must be kept "safe" from categories of content) is more insidious, so it does deserve more attention.
    • Hoodedcrow 5mo ago
      I feel like the complaint about this not adding to security could be read in a really wrong way. Instead of "this is some hypocritical BS", could be interpreted as "lol let's lock EOL devices from even lower integrity tiers". Doubt this is possible because so, so many people use EOL phones, but still.
      • userbinator 5mo ago
        Doubt this is possible because so, so many people use EOL phones, but still. Because many people have fortunately realised that "EOL" is just an excuse to create lots of e-waste and push even more hostile unwanted changes.
        • Hoodedcrow 5mo ago
          Eh, not really. Using EOL devices is genuinely a bad idea, it's just that with phones you have no choice due to the updates usually being only like 2-3 years and alternative OSes not being as accessible as Linux. And most people don't even care or know anyway.
        • erikerikson 5mo ago
          I would attribute EOL phone use to largely to being frugal or poor. I'm sure at least one person considers the ecological factor but I'd expect that to be a small cohort.
  • saltcured 5mo ago
    And it didn't even take attestation to cause this absurd situation where many businesses or social groups were only reachable behind Facebook or Whatsapp or whatever. To me this is such a bizarre cyberpunk dystopia. Like if we could only send letters and packages to people subscribed to the same private postal service, or drive on roads that had cross-licensing with our brand of car.
    • chii 5mo ago
      > could only send letters and packages to people subscribed to the same private postal service ... that's a corporate monopoly's wet dream.
  • steelframe 5mo ago
    I like to ride my bicycle with my friends in rides organized by the (Pacific Northwest) Cascade Bicycle Club. They require that I solve a Google reCAPTCHA in order to register for a ride. Google is already completely locking me out from being able to do that. When I try to click on the squares to select whatever items it's asking, it indefinitely loops. When I try using the audio version, it completely blocks me from using it saying that there has been suspicious activity. That means that I ride alone these days. I did not renew my membership this year. The last time I experienced something like this was when Facebook starting being the only way to participate in certain events. Back when that happened, I simply counted myself as excluded and did other things with my time and money.
    • andy99 5mo ago
      I hope you contacted them to explain why. People usually think I’m a nut when I do it, or are too stupid to understand and think it’s a tech support issue, but it’s worth at least trying to make it clear that you are choosing not to use/do/pay something because of their choice to use recaptcha
      • ChuckMcM 5mo ago
        +1 to this. I had a long conversation with a local shop that went to only ordering online or through an enslaved ipad on a pedestal at the entrance. I explained to them that I wasn't going to use their app or web page online and the iPad at the door has people trying to figure it out so orders take longer, and the combination means I just won't eat there any more.
        • pigeons 5mo ago
          I also stop going to these places, and also not out of any deep principle, it just isn't something I want to waste my life doing, I'll go somewhere i can just ask for what i want to order.
      • Footprint0521 5mo ago
        Why not just 2captcha it and go on with your life?
• ls612 5mo ago
  Asymmetric cryptography and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. I’m not even joking all of the centralization of power and the rise of totalitarianism tech is driving is downstream from asymmetric cryptography.
  • lpcvoid 5mo ago
    I disagree, I think you cast the net way too wide. Asymmetric cryptography enables secure communication in the first place. It's being used nefariously by Google and Apple, of course, but that's to be expected from big tech.
    • ls612 5mo ago
      Isn’t the ability to create certificates guaranteed conceptually once you have asymmetric crypto? In that case there is no intermediate technology which allows key exchanges without also creating digital totalitarianism.
      • lpcvoid 5mo ago
        [dead]
    • rossjudson 5mo ago
      Nefariously how?
      • microtonal 5mo ago
        Remote attestation also uses asymmetric cryptography. (Device-bound private key that can sign attestation challenges, a known public key that can verify that challenge was signed with the device-bound private key.)
        • rossjudson 5mo ago
          Not sure where the nefarious is in that. That's how PKI works.
• rvz 5mo ago
  Well there you have it. > Governments are increasingly mandating using Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity for not only their own services but also commercial services. The EU is leading the charge of making these requirements for digital payments, ID, age verification, etc. Many EU government apps require them. Even the "beloved" EU government is also in on it as well as banking apps are pushing for this too. They do not care about you and the so-called "Open Web" is already dead on arrival. [0] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116551068177121365 https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116551068177121365
  • bigyabai 5mo ago
    > They do not care about you By "they" you mean FAANG and the FTC, right? Telling the EU to respect the Open Web does nothing to protect users if you continue to approve the export of attested hardware. America is deliberately abetting authoritarian schemes.
    • rvz 5mo ago
      > By "they" you mean FAANG and the FTC, right? You might need to the sentence again since I was quite clear who I was talking about: "EU government" "banking apps" ...and everyone else who benefits from pushing "digital payments, ID, age verification, etc." that will use "Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity" APIs. It isn't that hard to understand.
      • bigyabai 5mo ago
        There's only two companies enabling those crooks, as far as I can see it. If America refuses to take action, then this power will be abused by worse governments like Russia and China.
• grishka 5mo ago
  Our civilization desperately needs a method to modify modern microelectronics after manufacturing that can be used at least in a well-equipped repair shop, and it needs it yesterday. Alternatively, just make it illegal to ship any kind of initial bootloader as part of a CPU's/SoC's mask ROM in any computing device that is marketed as a general-purpose one. I.e. the first instruction that the CPU executes after reset must come from a storage device that is physically external to the CPU package.
  • altairprime 5mo ago
    This won’t help; the SOC silicon can be revised to record each executed instruction from power-on until secure-boot handoff opcode, with various supporting opcodes to query status-of / overflow-of / signature-for so that the OS reports pre-boot tampering implicitly as part of developing its own attestations.
    • grishka 5mo ago
      Then also make it illegal for the SoC to contain any cryptographic key material. My intention with this is to make sure that if someone were to desolder the flash chip and reprogram it, they could completely own the device without the device or SoC manufacturer having a say in it or a way to prevent or detect it.
      • altairprime 5mo ago
        Simpler to just make discrimination by hardware or software illegal than to legislate the silicon contents. That’s what everyone is upset about, after all: websites are gaining the ability to discriminate based on hardware-software with specific fidelity they never had before. If that was made unlawful, then you’d benefit billions of existing devices as well as future ones. The hard part is making the case that this sort of discrimination is worth fighting, but the John Deere lawsuits are (indirectly) further ahead on that point than the rest of tech is, weirdly enough. Example: I’m perfectly fine with my Touch ID sensor having a crypto-paired link to my SOC so that someone can’t swap in a malware-sensor at a border checkpoint; I also don’t want my device (or websites) to be able to discriminate against me installing my own homemade sensor. What that looks like in practice is close to what we have now, but not quite there yet — and is definitely not ‘no crypto-pairing at all’, as a ban on key material would enforce.
• mattmaroon 5mo ago
  So basically, ReCaptcha should be spun off into a not-for-profit.
  • nroets 5mo ago
    The board members will be lobbied, wined and dined by billion or even trillion dollar companies. If politicians can be bought then so can non-profits. Having said that, there may well be a room for a niche recaptcha-like service run by a non-profit. Perhaps one that uses a non-profit social graph or something.
• acgourley 5mo ago
  It's so obvious to me states need to create a soul bound identity system, replace social security numbers with it, and then let everyone else use cryptography on top of that (which is now cheap when you don't care about sybil attacks) to do private stuff.
  • realusername 5mo ago
    The places you actually need an ID are so rare, I don't think it's worth it to build such a system (and no, porn or social network definitely aren't valid use cases). It's a problem in search of a solution.
    • elric 5mo ago
      > It's a problem in search of a solution. The cynic in me suspects it's a way of slowly but methodically eradicating online anonymity and thus anonymity in general.
      • acgourley 5mo ago
        I think it would make the web MORE anonymous, not less! The reason it's hard to boot up a secure social network (such as Signal) is the handshake for (re)identifying people. Signal makes a ton of conceits here (the UX essentially asks people to assume phone numbers are securely held) in the name of low friction and it's why they grew so fast. The "real" secure social networks are essentially too difficult to get real adoption because they don't make these conceits around phone numbers, and demand real key exchanges. But if you had a L1 set of private and public keys the government works to maintain and defend, the L2 social networks like Signal (or banks, or markets, whatever) can do this cheap and easily.
  • SilverElfin 5mo ago
    We also need liability. Every time someone’s data is lost, the company losing it must be held accountable. They owe us huge amounts of money, and executives + board members should be jailed. No free pass. Let’s see then if they really want to collect all our information all the time. Right now, they take it and handle it irresponsibly because they’re free from consequences.
• MilkyFloor 5mo ago
  [dead]
• rasengan 5mo ago
  I agree hw attestation is net negative when forced upon end users. OTOH, when service providers use it, it results in transparency to end users [1] so it's really about how it is used. [1] https://bmail.ag/verify https://bmail.ag/verify
• CharlesW 5mo ago
  The thread is a bit vague. Am I understanding correctly that GrapheneOS Foundation's objection isn't to attestation per se, but that they can't participate in Google-controlled attestation APIs? In other words, although GrapheneOS can be cryptographically attested, apps using Google Play Integrity won’t accept it because it isn't Google-certified/GMS-licensed?
  • zb3 5mo ago
    It's a different thing if banking/government apps require a device certified for security, and a different thing if this certification certifies that the user's device has Google spyware preinstalled with elevated privileges.. Google doesn't certify devices basing on security, so that kind of attestation should have no place in banking/government apps, otherwise it just enforces the duopoly
    • surajrmal 5mo ago
      It's hard to listen to arguments when everything is so hyperbolic. The stated rationale for attestation for captcha is to ensure there is a human on the other end and not a bot. This requires a system which is not capable of automated input. The other use case is for ensuring that an application is running on a system which protects the app from being tampered with (by the user, malware, or otherwise). While that seems to run counter to the preferences of the hn userbase, it is a legitimate desire from an application developer. Neither of these situations are related to any so-called spyware. The fact that Google is involved here had to do with the fact that they are a trusted party for folks to rely on to ensure the desired properties are being met, nothing more. In theory it should be possible for other parties to provide similar attestation, but that party needs to be deeply involved in the OS and boot chain. Apple is obviously capable and is equally trusted. Graphene probably provides the necessary properties but lacks a good way to attest due to the reliance on Google specific attestation APIs. That could be remedied. Otherwise Graphene would need to create their own APIs and applications would need to use them, which would be a harder sell. In both cases the party asking for the attestation needs to decide to trust Graphene, which is still a barrier, but that's an easier way forward. Alternatively, Google could trust Graphene and everyone who already trusts Google would inherit such trust.
• SilverElfin 5mo ago
  It is definitely a monopoly enabler. But also a threat to speech. You can only participate online if you have attested hardware. And that hardware will be tied back to you. It’s another threat to privacy like age verification laws.
  • mohamedkoubaa 5mo ago
    Safety is the pretext. This is the actual reason why this is happening, and why it is accelerating now
• iamkrazy 5mo ago
  It's still not too late. With the help of Claude et. al, we can make a truly open mobile OS from ground up. We can make an app translater that can translate Android and iOS apps to our OS. We can make deals with manufacturers to start shipping phones with this OS. We have the will, there's enough of us on this site to make an impact. All ee need is good leadership. Please somebody with enough clout step up.
  • applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    The OP is from an already-existing open mobile OS, which already has a deal with a manufacturer. The problem isn't, and has never been, making an OS. This is not a technical problem. This is a political problem.
    • whatsupdog 5mo ago
      But that open mobile OS is still a fork of Android, which is too hell bent on privacy (which is not a bad cause, but something that masses don't care about). We should focus on an OS which is hell bent on UX, UI and other features that masses crave.
      • SchemaLoad 5mo ago
        None of that helps the OP issue of hardware attestation for reCaptcha.
  • krupan 5mo ago
    You really don't know the limits of LLMs. They can't make anything "from the ground up" they are only as capable what they were trained on. Someone had an LLM make a C compiler and they found code regurgitated verbatim from existing compilers. You better believe that any OS it writes will look astonishingly similar to an existing open source one.
• comandillos 5mo ago
  These kind of things just make me want to use Graphene even more, or literally any platform that isnt the monopoly ones. Somehow I think AI and vibecoding, even if it may sound as an unpopular opinion, will allow people to build free ecosystems and actually usable devices that dont rely on the usual providers.
• gib444 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • microtonal 5mo ago
    They recently said that in the future they want to do more long-form posts just in their discussion forum and then link to it from Mastodon, etc.
    • gib444 5mo ago
      Well nothing is stopping them
• gibbsrich 5mo ago
  This was a wild ride, what an adventure. So many moving pieces, this really is just one big house of cards.
  • gibbsrich 5mo ago
    I definitely posted this on the wrong thread, I am sorry
• miohtama 5mo ago
  The EU Digital (identity) Wallet EUDI requires hardware attestation by Google or Apple, effectively tying all the digital EU identities to American duopoly. Talk about digital sovereignity. Apparently protecting the children > sovereignity. https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-development-documentation-public/-/work_items/2 https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/eudi-wallet/wallet-developmen...
  • retired 5mo ago
    So with a single flip of the switch, the president of the USA can shut down our EU Digital Identity Wallet. Why was this decision ever made?
    • onlytue 5mo ago
      I hate to beat a dead horse and have people downvote me but: the EU has always been corrupted. The knowledge and effects are not evenly distributed until it hits each niche group. Then they find out the hard way that they were useful idiots. It’s ok to be wrong/admit. Let’s just move past the infighting and see those in power for the evil that they are.
      • rvz 5mo ago
        Exactly. I have said this for a very long time and the EU (and many other governments) are not our friends and they are just as corrupt. Remember ChatControl? Anytime anyone criticises the EU here, you will get downvoted even after trying to warn the EU defenders that they are not our friends at all. I was asking for evidence about the EU digital ID wallets about what the "disinformation" was around it 3 years ago [0] and not a single link of it was given. At this point, being an EU defender and supporting the "open web" are incompatible since you will be using your EU digital identity wallet [1] with your phone to login to your bank and the internet will push age verification with it, locking you out if you don't sign up. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36105002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36105002 [1] https://eudi.dev/latest/ https://eudi.dev/latest/
• revolvingthrow 5mo ago
  Is it possible to dual-boot on android? It sounds defeatist but I no longer believe it’s possible to change course - the increasingly authoritarian governments, google and most moneyed interests are all on the same side, so it’s just a matter of when. Being on the palantir-approved google ranch for the few Apps You Need + graphene (or some other alt OS) for everything else would be quite inconvenient, but still better than carrying two phones, which nobody wants to do.
  • palata 5mo ago
    Well, authoritarian governments don't like to be at the mercy of another country. So even for authoritarian governments it would make a lot of sense to allow open source alternatives like GrapheneOS instead of depending entirely on US monopolies.
  • zb3 5mo ago
    GrapheneOS said that's not possible, but I'd actually want to see some expanded explanation. TEE attests that the OS is booted with a given AVB key, OS version and the bootloader unlock state.. But I know that vbmeta is per-slot, so I guess the whole chain is.. I also read that if you flash "custom_avb_key", the original AVB key is also permitted.. Could this mean we could theoretically dual-boot while being able to flash the OS manually using fastbootd? Credential Encrypted userdata would be unaccessible though, I'm not sure if the second OS could mount that partition at all. But I'd like someone more competent to address all this.
    • strcat 5mo ago
      Dual booting would be much further from passing attestation checks and would be incompatible with a bunch of the hardware-based security features. The boot slots are needed for A/B updates and include the firmware partitions. They're not useful for this and don't provide useful functionality for it. It would be entirely possible to build a bootloader for loading multiple different operating systems but it would be a hacked together mess without proper firmware updates or security. It would require heavily modifying both GrapheneOS and the stock OS to fit them into it. It would require losing a lot of the hardware-based security integration. What would be the point? The end result would be much further from passing attestation checks than GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS has near perfect app compatibility with the exception of the Play Integrity API. Other anti-tampering checks are largely compatible with GrapheneOS with the exception of tripping from certain hardening features which is increasingly being resolved with workarounds and there are toggles to avoid it already.
• GeekyBear 5mo ago
  I am reminded of the period when secure boot was being developed for PCs. Microsoft certainly wanted to be the only company whose OS was allowed to boot with secure boot turned on. Google should not be allowed to close the supposedly "open" ecosystem they created any more than Microsoft was allowed to.
  • ryukoposting 5mo ago
    > the period when secure boot was being developed for PCs. You mean right now? At a firmware level, the scope of "trusted computing" is expanding with every passing year. > close the ecosystem they created any more than Microsoft was allowed to. We are in the process of allowing Microsoft to close the PC platform. TPM is required to run Windows now. Nearly every new PC ships with "secure boot" enabled, adding a new technical barrier to escaping Windows that didn't exist before. Remove that toggle from the BIOS, and you now effectively have a vehicle to Windows-only PCs.
    • heavyset_go 5mo ago
      It's much worse than just TPM now: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/pluton/microsoft-pluton-security-processor https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-... All modern PCs ship with Pluton coprocessors. The end-to-end remote attestation hardware infrastructure is all already there, waiting for someone to flip a switch and turn it on.
  • heavyset_go 5mo ago
    When it first shipped out, Secure Boot was used to lock other OSes out on early devices, it was after pushback that it was implemented such that it allowed you to enroll your own keys. That said, there are countless mobile devices with locked bootloaders and and boot integrity attestation that will never run anything other than OEM OSes. That's equivalent to a locked Secure Boot + UKI-like system on PCs and it's already here.
• yowo 5mo ago
  I literaly switched away from banks whose apps dont work on GrapheneOS
• coppsilgold 5mo ago
  Requiring authorized silicon (and software) isn't even the biggest problem here. They do not use zero knowledge proof systems or blind signatures. So every time you use your device to attest you leave behind something (the attestation packet) that can be used to link the action to your device. They put on a show about how much they care about your privacy by introducing indirection into the process (static device 'ID' is used to acquire an ephemeral 'ID' from an intermediate server) but it's just a show because you don't know what those intermediary severs are doing: You should assume they log everything. And this just the remote attestation vector, the DRM 'ID' vector is even worse (no meaningful indirection, every license server has access to your burned-in-silicon static identity). And the Google account vector is what it is. Using blind signatures for remote attestation has actually been proposed, but no one notable is currently using it: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Anonymous_Attestation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Anonymous_Attestation> There are several possible reasons for this, the obvious one is that they want to be able to violate your privacy at will or are mandated to have the capability. The other is that because it's not possible to link an attestation to a particular device the only mitigation to abuse that is feasible is rate limiting which may not be good enough for them - an adversary could set up a farm where every device generates $/hour from providing remote attestations to 'malicious' actors.
  • Hoodedcrow 5mo ago
    Would like to read a writeup on this, I was certain it was going to be something like this from the app's announcement. Also I recall a discussion on Graphene's forums that DRM ID is not only retained there, but stays the same across profiles.
    • coppsilgold 5mo ago
      I simplified the process in my description. The DRM ID Android has is not what I was referring to. I was referring to the static private key that is stored in the silicon. At any time an application can initiate a license request process using DRM APIs which will elicit an unchangeable HWID from your device. The only protection is that it will be encrypted for an authorized license server private key so collusion may be required (intel agencies almost certainly sourced 'authorized' private keys for themselves). Google or Apple also has the option to authorize keys for themselves. In 'theory' all such keys should be stored in "trusted execution environments" on license servers and not divulge client identities for whatever that's worth: <https://tee.fail https://tee.fail>.
• TZubiri 5mo ago
  Ironically, the other top article on HN right now is CVE-2024-YIKES. You can't have the cake and eat it too. Maybe we need to close some doors, especially if the barrier for publication is literally just a couple of prompts and uploading the result to distributor like npm or play store.
  • userbinator 5mo ago
    You can't have the cake and eat it too. One of our Founding Fathers said it best (I know the original context was different, but it fits so well with the current theme): "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither." Also, "the optimal amount of crime is nonzero."
    • TZubiri 5mo ago
      https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ I think you are conflating free speech with right to a platform and distribution. Which isn't quite a right, or at least not as constitutional, the former is about not obstructing speech, the latter is about positively enabling it. One of the key aspects of distribution is cost. You can pay for a domain, which is 15$/yr, and a host (which can be as cheap), and distribute your software that way. Since when did we agree that randoms have right to publish software, and vanish? (And why are 'we' using such code in production with a straight face?) The internet founding fathers wisely designed Domain names, DNS, ICANN, HTTP, TCP, IP, NICs. NPM is not in that echelon, NPM is gratis, not freedom. Also, freedom is, unless you are a libertarian a patriot or a nation, a historical concept, not irrelevant, but definitely a concept that was born out of a different time (slavery, secession), in its modern american sense, it's most definitely not gratis-adjacent. To reference a specific American Freedom, in order to have access to justice, you have to pay court fees, and an attorney, there's mechanisms in place to waive those fees or have a public defender, but not even America's modern freedom developed a secondary system which pretended to have no cost, and if it did (private lateral arbitration). I guess private entities have the right to offer public services by proxy, like with subdomains, github pages, vercel, npm packages. But I wouldn't call that freedom, in essence, the cake you can't have and eat in this case is Freedom and Gratis. You either pay the minimum costs established by the public system, or use a gratis non-free system to distribute your 'speech'. And we the users, have the right to ignore the gratis spam and demand some sort of PoW for messages. The system works
• thecatapps 5mo ago
  With all of the discourse around hardware attestation, digital ID, and age verification in recent weeks/months, is there actually any good solution to the problems these existing tools (Privacy Pass, WEI, Fraud Defense, uploading IDs) claim to solve? Are there open and privacy-preserving standards that can solve the problem of bots and minors? If not, what would be required to establish one, and is it realistic? Businesses will do what businesses will do, but it seems to me having something to point to and saying "do this instead" is more effective than "this sucks and isn't even about security, don't do this at all" even though it's true.
  • xinayder 5mo ago
    > Are there open and privacy-preserving standards that can solve the problem of bots and minors? If not, what would be required to establish one, and is it realistic? Ideally there shouldn't be standards for this. What we have already is enough. Companies claiming they are closing down their services/devices to protect the users is total BS. Facebook has admitted they get 10% of their ad revenue from scams, and that's the reason they won't go after scammers on their platforms. Same can be said for Google. They could come up with numerous ways to block bots or make captchas harder for actual bots (while also not flagging every non-Chrome user as a potential bot, like they do nowadays), but they pretend this is an unsolvable problem that requires a nuclear solution, it used to be Web DRM but now it's called Fraud Defense.
    • Ajedi32 5mo ago
      I disagree. Bots have always been an issue, but now every form of CAPTCHA that can be solved by a human can also be solved by a multi-modal language model. Bots are slowly taking over in forums where they previously would have been immediately spotted and banned. If the only argument you can make every time someone proposes an onerous, privacy-destroying solution to this problem is deny the problem exists, you're going to lose. GP is correct, we need an alternative we can point to.
      • Ajedi32 5mo ago
        > Bots are slowly taking over in forums where they previously would have been immediately spotted and banned. Failed to mention this but part of the reason for this is that even after getting past CAPTCHA and creating an account, spam bots in online communities have always had to pass a sort of informal ongoing Turing test to not get outed as a bot by human users and banned. In the past, that would happen almost instantly as soon as the bot posted anything. Now they can often go undetected by even human mods for a long time, maybe even indefinitely.
• minraws 5mo ago
  I mean sure Google & Apple are evil, but don't we all need some evil in our lives, EU citizens doesn't matter we love the evil and honestly we enjoy it. What can't we do for these two companies we will beg, we will bend, we might even consider grovelling as long as the evil is around, to help us find the greater evils in the world. That is, the people we don't like, might be the bad guys today, but just don't worry you will be the bad guy too, just wait until the bad guys get into power... I haven't read the hobbit or lord of the rings but man if this isn't greed corrupting all men then I don't know what is. I feel sick of all this, I might really just move out and live the rest of my life out on the farm somewhere.
• dminik 5mo ago
  It's amazing that we're letting the Google Apple duopoly completely decide who can and cannot use completely unrelated services. Imagine getting banned from Google services for anti-google views and being unable to log into your bank account. We really should breakup the Alphabet.
  • quantummagic 5mo ago
    It is naive to think that this is being done without the full support of the government. They won't step in to stop it.
• vvpan 5mo ago
  Miss that monopoly busting of yesteryear. The elephant in the room is that private forces who do not have public good in mind have gotten way too powerful to the detriment of everybody's well-being. Everybody's except the state's surveillance wings. Break them up. Break them up. Break them up.
• aleksejs 5mo ago
  > It doesn't provide a useful security feature, but it does lock out competition very well. This seems to presuppose that service providers using reCAPTCHA are either clueless idiots or actively expending resources and lowering their conversion rates to support the supposed Google/Apple duopoly. That does not strike me as a plausible claim.
• dickywad 5mo ago
  [dead]
• bobmarleybiceps 5mo ago
  it's so great to see people boosting "security" in a way that also just happens to require locking in to big-tech approved apps that send all your data to big-tech so that they can deliver ads to you via your big-tech approved device using your big-tech approved os running your big tech approved browser showing your big-tech approved video platform with your big-tech approved content (oh, and also sends your data to your big-tech approved government)
• ajdude 5mo ago
  > Google's reCAPTCHA is planning an approach where they use Privacy Pass on Apple hardware, their own approach on Google Mobile Services Android devices and a QR code scanning system to require an iOS or Google certified Android device for Windows and other systems I wonder if we'll get something similar happening with cloudflare
  • xinayder 5mo ago
    If you use Turnstile you can skip all the Cloudflare captchas.
• derelicta 5mo ago
  Mark my words: in ten years from now on, the Chinese web will be more free and open than any Western country.
  • krupan 5mo ago
    Isn't half the reason companies push for these sorts of controls is so they are allowed by the Chinese government to do business there?
  • SchemaLoad 5mo ago
    In China they have solved this issue already by having every website log in with your phone number which is already directly tied to your Chinese ID. Problem is some countries don't lock down their phone numbers this far so for this to work you have to whitelist country codes which have secured phone numbers.
• mrexcess 5mo ago
  There are a number of technological / legal hybrid policies developing that come at the very jugular vein of computing freedom - the notion of a “general purpose” computer itself. OS level identity / age verification, hardware attestation, walled garden app signature requirements. All evincing the same aim.
• userbinator 5mo ago
  In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that they reversed the decision. Then the "security" and Trusted Computing authoritarians continued pushing for TPMs and related tech, and contributed to the rise of mobile walled gardens. Windows 11's TPM requirements were another step towards their goal. The amount of propaganda about how that was supposed to be a good thing, both here and elsewhere, was shocking. It turns out a significant (but hopefully decreasing) number of the population is easily coerced into anything when "security" is given as a justification. The war on general-purpose computing continues, and we need to keep fighting. Stallman was right, as always. Time to give his "Right to Read" another read. (If it hasn't been done already, an AI-generated short film of it would be a great idea...) "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
  • krupan 5mo ago
    Totally with you until you brought in AI, a completely centralized and proprietary tool.
    • userbinator 5mo ago
      Local models exist, but there's also irony in using the tools to spread the message of the opposition.
      • krupan 5mo ago
        The local models are still centralized and proprietary. They are basically closed source software.
        • userbinator 5mo ago
          Closed or open source doesn't matter; it's the ability to control them that's important. People have been cracking and patching for decades without source, but they have that control. Contrast this with remote attestation, where they might show you the source code for everything but you're still powerless to do anything.
• einpoklum 5mo ago
  Not to rain on the parade, but doesn't GrapheneOS only works on Google Pixel devices? I mean, that's still in the Google jail on a physical level, even if they swap out the software.
  • criticalfault 5mo ago
    they made a deal with Motorola, from next year we should have an alternative. in any case, google started to cause issues with pixel 10, so it's not as easy to port it
    • strcat 5mo ago
      GrapheneOS has full support for 10th generation Pixels. It was much harder to add initial support for them than past generation Pixels but it isn't harder to maintain now that they're supported. There should be multiple 2027 Motorola flagships meeting all the requirements for GrapheneOS. They'll be providing official support for it and they're already working on porting GrapheneOS to their devices.
    • einpoklum 5mo ago
      > google started to cause issues with pixel 10 Google started causing issues over 20 years ago.
• p0w3n3d 5mo ago
  To think I'm gonna live in a cross-state totalitarian world
• tamimio 5mo ago
  The best workaround for now is -as the solution is always to change these regulations not the technical workarounds- is to have a secondary smaller phone that has the sim card, google botnet services, etc., and use that for any verification needed or login to banks or whatever, and keep this device turned off in your house so they don’t track you too and use it where needed. That while also pressuring web services not to use recaptchas and similar invasive services.
• OhMeadhbh 5mo ago
  Partially apropos... There's a Heinlien quote that goes "When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere." Which I think in this case may mean that I'm hoping an Apple or Google exclusive id system couldn't be ubiquitous enough to be required. But forethought doesn't seem to be modern man's strong suit.
• jgord 5mo ago
  What freedoms do we value ? freedom of speech, freedom of compute, freedom to own assets, to sell our work or give it away, bodily autonomy, freedom to travel, to read to learn ? Amid the massive hype of the Web3 Crypto era, there was a kernel of useful innovation : that you can choose to have unique digital copies of things, and thus you can have a way of sending value that bypasses the middlemen, be they local thugs, bent politicians, violent regimes, benevolent dictators, or the dominant hegemony. Having central big-Corp approve your content or sign your executable or take a vig on your sales, or license your hardware - these may be common, but are not a universal law of nature. The internet itself is our best example of the value of technology open for all to use. Frankly, that is in danger. Whether it is bogus age-checks in your OS, a hidden bios OS, or the move away from owning your own compute [ because the GPU / CPU and RAM are priced so high you have to rent them ], consumers need to pool resources and ensure open access. Kudos to France for mandating a Linux OS for their public service workforce. Good on the Europeans for doubling down on renewables to insulate themselves from petrodollar volatility, and making sure portable devices have replaceable batteries. Cory Doctorow has some great rants on enshizzification. Garys Economics YT channel has some great rants on why high inequality steals resources, see also Piketty. The technocrats on this forum have an understanding of these measures the common person may not, and thus a moral obligation to weigh in on the issues and warn 'genpop'. Resist, dont let the buzzkills wear you down.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• Retr0id 5mo ago
  It is possible to bypass Play Integrity on most devices (even at the "strong" level) using a sewing needle. Specifically, you poke the data lines of the memory bus to induce bitflips, much like I described in https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/dram-emfi.html https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/dram-emfi.html This is trickier if your device has the DRAM mounted directly on top of the CPU, but still possible - you'll need to do some BGA rework to get a wire soldered to one of the DQ lines. Once you get a physical memory read/write primitive, you can start patching the kernel. Play Integrity does not detect this, since it only attests the state of the kernel at boot. I chose to patch out the permission checks related to ptrace, allowing me to inject frida-gadget into running apps, and to inject shellcode into pid 1. The initial exploit is pretty unreliable, and usually takes a few reboots to hit. But once it lands, the device is pwned until the next reboot - like a "tethered jailbreak". I tested this on a Samsung A06 because it was the cheapest device supporting Play Integrity I could get my hands on, but there's no fundamental reason it shouldn't work on any other device, including flagships. Some mitigations would require a different exploit strategy (e.g. memory encryption), but the fundamental flaw is still there. Demo: https://bsky.app/profile/retr0.id/post/3mljtyauw322d https://bsky.app/profile/retr0.id/post/3mljtyauw322d
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo ago
    Play Integrity will only get more advanced, though
    • Retr0id 5mo ago
      Indeed, my point is less "don't worry about play integrity" and more "don't put it in your app"
  • userbinator 5mo ago
    Much like DRM, the point is that we shouldn't have to fight this BS in the first place.
• martin-t 5mo ago
  Observations: 1) Only law can fix this. Anybody (looking at you ancaps) telling you "if you don't like it, start a competitor" doesn't understand how the economy and network effects work. 2) The general population is a combination of not caring and not even being smart enough to be able to understand. If everyone votes on everything (like most "democracies" where you vote for parties), bigger issues like healthcare, abortions, LGBT will dominate and everything else is noise. 3) People who don't know what public-private crypto or zero-knowledge proofs are shouldn't be allowed to vote on issues where these are relevant factors. 4) We need to fix voting so people can vote on only the stuff they care about and only the stuff they are actually informed about. This works in small teams of highly competent people - at work or in FOSS - and only when they have the same goals. Politics is by nature adversarial and I don't know how to fix this.
• charcircuit 5mo ago
  Being able to cut out abuse from things like cheaters is too useful of a tool for developers to give up. The big problem here as mentioned in the thread is that the light of approved hardware is not based off of security of maintaining security of the attested application but upon Play services licensing.
• aussieguy1234 5mo ago
  Taken a step further, we could be heading for a world where if you don't run the Dictators approved device including all of its spyware, you're locked out of everything. I'm sure this will happen in non-free countries quickly if Hardware Attestation becomes commonplace to access basic services.
• gyush 5mo ago
  It seems to me that comments here are reading this as saying attestation is bad, when the real argument is that attestation should explicitly provide a path of inclusion for non-Apple and Google providers. The headline seems to make the statement that Apple and Google are evil and doing this for monopoly lock-in, and GrapheneOS, a competitor, will stand for the people against that. But given their final counterpoint is that they should have been included too and they rant about being rejected from Google's Play Integrity API for unclear reasons they claim are malicious, it seems they do acknowledge there's security value here: we do critically need for full-chain-of-signature attestations for critical identity data, the only way to avoid someone using AI to create fraud identities trivially.
  • Georgelemental 5mo ago
    That is not what GrapheneOS is saying. They mention their exclusion as proof that attestation has nefarious motives, not because they would be OK with it otherwise
  • ysnp 5mo ago
    They have commented elsewhere that any inclusion/exclusion criteria (if at all) should be transparent and collaboratively decided rather than arbitrary, monopolised or ineffectual/deceptive. They mention several times that people should not be excluded from web services for browser/OS choice.
  • strcat 5mo ago
    The position of GrapheneOS is that attestation shouldn't be used to restrict people to an allowlist of hardware and operating systems. It can be used to without forbidding them from using what they want to use. However, if it's going to be used to make an allowlist of hardware and operating systems, then it needs to permit any any at least as secure as what they're permitting to be approved. Instead, they're enforcing Google's business model for licensing Google Mobile Services while not requiring secure devices at all. There's no security value in the current Play Integrity API which permits devices with no patches for 10 years. Even the Play Integrity API strong integrity level only enforces being no more than 1 year behind on the official Android security bulletins which are 3-4 months outdated at release so that's nearly a year and a half behind of patches. It also has the massive loophole of permitting being arbitrarily behind on patches for earlier Android versions than Android 13, so even the strong integrity level permits a device launched with Android 8 with no patches applied since then. That's not a security check, it's a business model check to lock out alternatives not licensing Google Mobile Services. The licensing terms for Google Mobile Services have been found to be illegal in multiple countries. Google enforcing agreeing to those terms with the Play Integrity API is a truly extraordinarily violation of antitrust laws. Governments are not only failing to act but adopting it themselves. It's going to be looked back on as a massive failure for technology regulation/legislation along with government tech policy beyond that.
• OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo ago
  I'm surprised there aren't more HNWs supporting GrapheneOS. Seems like the Venn diagram of rich people and techies who care about this would have quite some overlap, and Graphene, despite its many faults, is doing a lot of groundwork in this space
• sophrosyne42 5mo ago
  Patents and copyright were the original form of monopoly. As long as software is not open source, it is by definition a monopoly
• b112 5mo ago
  I can barely read this, somethong supposedly this serious, would be much better as a single page, a cogent, actual article.
• Dove 5mo ago
  This is tyranny: making people powerless, afraid of each other, and submissive, per Aristotle's understanding.[1] The technological means are new, to be sure, but the social strategy is as old as civilization. Mark my words. General purpose computing and private, direct communication are things too powerful for a tyrant to permit the people to have. The freedom we've enjoyed for the last several decades, to build what we want, to run what we want, to network with who we want, is not the default and will always be under attack. We had it for a little while by the generosity of the previous generation. It was not then, and is not now, and never will be free. [1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0058:book%3D5:section%3D1314a https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
  • rimliu 5mo ago
    is that tyrant in the room with us now?
    • Dove 5mo ago
      We are a generation of tyrants, each oppressing the others in his own little domain. Gone is the dream of making a modest living while enriching humanity with offerings of technology. Whatever is invented now is gated, rented, and exploited for power, in the shadows and in the open, and what technological power had been granted to the people is whittled away year by year, immense riches destroyed so someone in particular can extract something from a replacement. There is no Caesar to assassinate because it is everyone, or near enough. It is the idea that this is how you do things. Tyranny is in the air and in the water, that exploitation of power for more power by means of misery, old as mankind. In such a world, removing one tyrant only gets you ruled by his rival, who is often worse. The historical recipe for freedom and abundance is a people who, as a whole people, are generous with power and expect it of each other at every level, and are viciously intolerant of its abuse. Such was the world of technology for about five decades in the last century, but it hasn't been so for the last two or three. I think it doesn't take much for a few awful people to eat up any abundance, if they are allowed to, and that war is written across the history of computing from its very beginning. But these days, it is not a healthy society defending itself from would-be conquerers, but a world of feuding warlords anxious to eat up any excess anywhere, not only for profit but because thriving and independent people are inherently a threat. With few exceptions, and it seems like fewer every year, any kingdom now which consists of a group of people and some code, be it a software service, a phone, a game, a car, or a dang toaster oven, looks like a despot extracting taxes from his peasants, not a king sheparding his people. Certainly the big ones are that way, and the legacy of the last generation continues to be eroded. Whatever the means, that tangle of the legal and economic and social and educational and technological and cultural, and I do not pretend it is anything but a thorny and incomprehensible thicket, Aristotle's identification of the broad themes remains relevant. Divided, humiliated, disempowered - whatever the pretext, the encroachment of dark forces is unmistakable. The only defense is (and ever was) those who see their work as in some sense sacred and power as conveying a duty to serve. The generation for whom Superman is a central myth builds one way; the generation for whom it is Game of Thrones builds very differently. Not that these stories are necessarily causes, but their resonance is a reflection of how two very different groups of people think about power.
• ethagnawl 5mo ago
  Seems to me like Microsoft might be opposed to this duopoly and have pockets deep enough to fight it, right? For one, this would make their possible re-entry into the mobile space harder and more costly but I guess it'll inevitably become a standard that other providers could fulfill.
  • userbinator 5mo ago
    On the contrary, Microsoft was one of the early promoters of such technology; look up Palladium/TCG/NGSCB.
    • ethagnawl 5mo ago
      Right. I know full well they're not philosophically opposed. However, this current duopoly does exclude them and increases their burden if they should ever want to re-enter this market.
• TowerTall 5mo ago
  The linked article only seems to cover Google and Android devices. Microsoft also have their take on this. > "Microsoft Pluton security processor is a chip-to-cloud security technology built with Zero Trust principles at the core. Microsoft Pluton provides hardware-based root of trust, secure identity, secure attestation, and cryptographic services." https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/pluton/microsoft-pluton-security-processor https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...
  • userbinator 5mo ago
    Related article about that 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 It's amazing to see how many "but it won't happen" comments there.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  I always say this when this topic comes up: remote attestation will be how our computing freedom dies. They've made it so that it doesn't even matter if they allow you to install whatever you want. Anything that isn't corporate owned is banned. Own your device? You "tampered" with it. You're banned. From everything. You're ostracized from digital society. You're not even a citizen, much less a second class citizen. Enroll your own keys? It doesn't matter. You're not trusted. You're a fraudster terrorist money launderer drug dealer pedophile. While I am glad that people continue to struggle, that GrapheneOS continues to fight and speak out, these developments still fill me with a terrible sadness. The future is bleak. We inch ever closer to the complete destruction of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for. It's a deep loss.
  • repelsteeltje 5mo ago
    Hardware attestation is like hardware DRM. It is intended to limit and restrict abundance. Abundance of clients (as a proxy for user attention) and abundance of copying, access and replay (as a proxy for "piracy"), resp. It won't matter to the masses, it won't hamper "bad actors" because hackers will find flaws instantly. It's just enshitfication.
    • matheusmoreira 5mo ago
      I hope you're right. I truly do. > hackers will find flaws instantly Yeah. https://tee.fail/ https://tee.fail/ The ability to circumvent these cryptographic attestations and pretend to be a "pristine" corporate owned device while in fact being free will be a key strategic capability in the future. They will no doubt pour billions into improving the technology though. I'm not sure if such a capability can be maintained over the long term. We don't have the resources.
      • repelsteeltje 5mo ago
        It probably won't matter to the average user: buy Apple, buy Google and be (little bit less) happy while your access to the free web gets little more enshittified... ...But there is always at least one hacker. The issue with hardening DRM is that at the core it's hard to protect against an adversary that with physical access to the device that keeps the very secret. From the vendor perspective, the very customer paying you is your potential enemy. That means that the root of trust isn't itself protected with cryptography. Instead, it relies on security-through-obscurity, Faraday cages, fuses, anti-tampering and lots of glue. And it's a numbers game if there are thousands of different devices, potentially with different flaws while your adversaries are hidden among billions of customers. There is still a gap between the hacker and main-stream availability, though: laws and legalism, like DMCA that penalize disclosing how the obfuscation and all work.
• momo26 5mo ago
  How sad that I spent thousand dollars to buy the phone but can't own it at all. Hardware attestation is like having a CCTV in my device, reporting everything to the company. If I want to use safer OS, then I will be excluded by the digital society cuz most app don't support it...
• xuzhenpeng 5mo ago
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• deleted 5mo ago
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• lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
  How does this work ? I am not sure I understand it.
• himata4113 5mo ago
  Heh, makes me laugh. just recently I was trying to get play protect 'certification' in a virtual machine took a bit of haggling and legitimately obtained samsung software to bypass it (and a 3 day gpt-5.5 /loop). Google has proven time and time again that they don't want to make this technology fool proof and I severely doubt this will be any different. Although I do agree that hardware attestation as a captcha is pure bullshit no matter the context.
• qwertytyyuu 5mo ago
  Man I hate threads like this, they grt interrupted by comments and the cadence is all weird because of the character limit
• AppAttestationz 5mo ago
  I agree with Graphene's take here. I've defended app attestation against baseless criticism, but this is a valid take. The only nuance I would make is that hardware attestation as a technology isn't inherently anti-competitive but rather the way these companies implement it. I would love to see a non-profit attestation service that publishes a list of allowed OS's, and roots that are deemed secure based on reality.
• willtemperley 5mo ago
  I found this an approachable way to understand the problem: https://byteiota.com/hardware-attestation-monopoly-tool-2/ https://byteiota.com/hardware-attestation-monopoly-tool-2/
• SamiahAman 5mo ago
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• jstrebel 5mo ago
  Banking apps are the deal-breaker for me. I only do business with banks that offer alternative ways of securing transactions e.g. eTan / ChipTAN / PhotoTAN with a separate reader / generator (see https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Verbraucherinnen-und-Verbraucher/Informationen-und-Empfehlungen/Online-Banking-Online-Shopping-und-mobil-bezahlen/Online-Banking/smsTAN/sms-tan_node.html https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Verbraucherinnen-und-Verbr...). This is probably a pretty European thing to do, but at least it avoids being locked in and being tracked.
  • gsliepen 5mo ago
    I'm happy that my bank (still) allows me to have both a stand-alone reader and a mobile app to authenticate. Because if you lose your authentication device, a lot of things suddenly get a lot harder. I also tried to use an old phone as a backup device. However, most authentication apps only allow it to be installed on a single device.
  • preisschild 5mo ago
    I did that too (in Austria) for a long time. Fortunately my Bank (Erste Bank / Sparkasse) fully (almost fully, no nfc pay, since it depends on GPay) supports GrapheneOS now
• roer 5mo ago
  Check if there are local digital rights groups to your country/area. I just joined two I didn't even know about. Meeting up and talking with likeminded people is a great way to get motivation for bigger change.
• codethief 5mo ago
  What I've failed to understand in this whole Google reCAPTCHA discussion so far: How is this is even going to prevent bot usage and increase security? What's going to stop a bot farm in SE Asia from running a fleet of Android devices?
  • nroets 5mo ago
    It will certainly make some bot farms unprofitable: Remember that they are now paying for a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software licenses, branding, distribution and customer support for which they have no use. Also consider this: While bot farms may be able to buy millions of Android devices, they will certainly attract a lot of scrutiny as they approach the billion mark. So bot farms will never own more Android devices than humans.
    • userbinator 5mo ago
      Remember that they are now paying for a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software licenses, branding, distribution and customer support for which they have no use. If you have the $$$, which the big guys certainly do, they'll just buy the bare attestation bits and figure out how to use them directly.
• puilp0502 5mo ago
  > Google defines certification requirements for Android which includes forcing bundling Google Chrome, etc. Isn't this a textbook case of an antitrust lawsuit? Y'know, with the whole ordeal with Windows/IE, I assume the court would find this as blatantly anticompetitive behavior.
• xyzal 5mo ago
  This is exactly why is legislation like the Digital Markets Act needed.
• khriss 5mo ago
  The superhuman efforts that folks on HN make to find technical workarounds and solutions is wonderful to see, but we must realize that this is not a technical problem. It's a social and legislative one. It can't be fought on technical grounds. The push back has to be via putting pressure on politicians by making regular people more aware. Right now, the vast majority of users are being bombarded with a one sided narrative of how 'insecure' their devices are. They read almost everyday about someone losing their life's savings due to 'hackers'. In this environment, they genuinely believe locking down their devices will make them more secure and prevent them from being 'hacked'. The powers that be make sure that the people never hear the other side. That people are giving absolute control to large corporations. In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged. If you want to make a meaningful contribution, however small, then make it a point to educate people about the control they are giving to large corporations like Google. It doesn't take much to convince them that Google et al don't have their best interests in mind. They already know it and have experienced it. The second thing to do is to encourage them to reach out to their member of congress via letters. It's easy enough to do, and politicians are terrified of going against voters. They rely on people's ignorance to quietly work against their constituent's interests while supporting whichever special interest happened to donate the most to their campaign fund.
  • socalgal2 5mo ago
    > In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged. Apple already does this and practically no one is outraged
    • nullc 5mo ago
      Apple doesn't own re-captcha. Apple's walled garden is still a tragedy but its a tragedy of willing participants.
    • sevenzero 5mo ago
      Because Apple always did this, everybody knew this and people buy Apple exactly because of this. Google now pulls the rug on Android which is a whole different story because it used to be open. The whole idea of Android was to be open.
• mtrovo 5mo ago
  It's the 3rd or 4th of threads like this in the front page and it's still not clear to me what are the alternatives that privacy advocates vouch for? Dead internet theory is happening, you have botnets with more budget than most of the third world countries and you could also add openclaw usage to same bucket. There's a real need for a protocol or specification for how to attest that an action was really done by a human and that human can be proven to be the one the service provider think they are. I don't think cryptography by itself would solve that right now.
  • deaux 5mo ago
    > Dead internet theory is happening, you have botnets with more budget than most of the third world countries and you could also add openclaw usage to same bucket. So what's the actual issue here? That on HN and Reddit and Instagram and X there'll be a lot of bots? As if they haven't been overrun by human astroturfers/etc for ages. Even ignoring that, what's the biggest issue you see with that, and why is it so big that it's fine to just enable a monopoly? Your presumption that there has to be an alternative is flawed. Maybe there is none. You're saying there's a real need, great. There's also a real need for sexual assault to be completely eliminated worldwide. I think everyone would agree with the that need is far bigger than bots on social networks. Doesn't mean we should just jail everyone just in case. You're manufacturing a need here as so important that by definition the ends justify the means. They don't.
  • assanineass 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • hnthrowaway4609 5mo ago
    [dead]
• jasonmm12 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• Anonyneko 5mo ago
  We will be truly screwed when internet providers will only allow attested hardware to access the internet. Doesn't even seem like an outrageous outcome anymore.
• deaton 5mo ago
  [dead]
• TimoKn 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• optimizedsphere 5mo ago
  Not even the first time Google has protected its Android monopoly by (ab)using hardware attestation in its other products. The Waymo app also enforces strict integrity checking and has therefore been broken on stock GrapheneOS for months.
• crowcroft 5mo ago
  I don't think the govt should be able to set rules that limit and control adult's freedoms with computers. I don't think the govt should be able to set rules that limit and control children's freedoms with computers. A child can't enter a nightclub or a liquor store. The closest digital equivalents are basically permanently available to them though.
• unixhero 5mo ago
  Of course it is
• zhouquanxi 5mo ago
  [flagged]