6 ms·

Can we stop normalizing being surveilled online and on our devices? Saying something like "the problem is not hardware attestation, but that they don't use ZKP

Can we stop normalizing being surveilled online and on our devices? Saying something like "the problem is not hardware attestation, but that they don't use ZKP". You are normalizing the new behavior. You shouldn't. It doesn't matter if they use ZKP or the latest, secure technology for hardware attestation. The issue is hardware attestation. It's the same with age ID. The issue is not that Age ID is prone to data leaks, the problem itself is called Age ID.

userbinator 5mo ago
Hell yes. I was going to post the same comment. I don't give a flying fuck how it's implemented. Remote attestation is inherently evil. I remember the WEI apologists trying to do the same thing to derail the argument. The problem is the goal, not the details. Just say no: DO NOT WANT!
- lxgr 5mo ago
  Remote attestation is a technology, not a policy or a political effort, so it can't be inherently evil. You can disagree with all its known or proposed uses, but then I think it makes more sense to name these.
  - userbinator 5mo ago
    Then explain why RA was invented? It is inherently against user freedom, just like "secure" boot and the rest of the corporate-authoritarian crap. People have woken up to the truth as the pieces come together. This article from 2022 is fun to look at and see how prescient it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106
    - MadnessASAP 5mo ago
      I have 2 servers, Alice and Bob, Bob has a secret, I want Bob to be able to share that secret with Alice. However, I want Alice to be able to prove to Bob that it is actually Alice, that it is running the correct AliceOS, and that AliceOS was loaded on bare metal Alice without nefarious pre-book or virtualization hooks. A TPM with measured boot (SecureBoot) does exactly this, remote attestation is how Alice proves to Bob that it is in a trusted configuration and wasn't tampered with.
      - brabel 5mo ago
        As someone who wanted to improve users security, that’s exactly why I find this thread fanatical opposition to attestation baffling. Nearly everyone uses a device that supports hardware attestation. It’s the best available tool to protect users from malware. We do implement a fallback that lowers security but lets the few users who have devices not able to attest properly to continue, but that really lowers security since we can’t even know if the device cryptography is itself compromised and hence can’t really trust anything it sends. If you have a different solution, do share it! I would love to use something you guys don’t find abhorrent! But until then I don’t really see the reason for all this negativity.
        MadnessASAP 5mo ago
        Sadly, the problem isn't the TPM or Remote Attestation. It's Google et al choosing to only talk to devices and software they like without concern for what the user wants or trusts. Compounded by everyone else just going along with it. A TPM where the device owner can't take ownership of the root key is worse then no TPM at all.
        superloika 5mo ago
        If the price to pay for security is freedom, then let users's devices be insecure. With time, they will learn good security hygiene. And if they don't, maybe they don't deserve it.
        PxldLtd 5mo ago
        I would be the safest citizen, free from experiencing crime and violence if I'm imprisoned in my house for life.
      - userbinator 5mo ago
        That's the academic viewpoint, but in practice it's used for far more hostile purposes. (One argues that since you own both of them, you should simply set up the two servers yourself with a key of your own choosing, asymmetric or otherwise, and then restrict physical access to them.)
  - xinayder 5mo ago
    DRM is a technology and is inherently evil. Web attestation is DRM for the web, and is inherently evil. Age ID is a technology and is inherently evil. We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad. It's not like these technologies were created for the greater good and misappropriated by bad actors. They were proposed by bad actors in the first place, they cannot not be inherently good.
    - lxgr 5mo ago
      DRM is arguably a specific use of various generic technology ranging from whitebox cryptography to trusted computing. I don't think remote attestation (or even more so its umbrella technology, trusted computing) is nearly as specifically targeted as DRM. > We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad. I agree that requiring remote attestation for generic web use is evil. It's way too heavy-handed an approach better reserved I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself.
      - salawat 5mo ago
        >I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself. A technology squarely and 100% percent intended to give people other than the end user the ability to sleep soundly at night knowing those dastardly end users can't muck with their software (the non-end user) on their (the end user's) devices is only a tool for the authoritarian minded. Sorry mate, but if you're sitting here thinking it's useful and neutral, you are part of the problem, because you're eyes-wide-shutting the fact the only people gaining from the technology are those that already have a terrible trustworthy-ness record in terms of not abusing the sovereignty of another person's machine. Show me an industry that ships source code, and manuals with all software that runs on the device, along with hardware manuals and the manuals to write your own drivers and doesn't use hardware primitives to enforce their business models over you, then we can talk about an industry where "trusted computing" might be neutral to the end user. History has not seen this relationship bore out, however. The "Trust" in "Trusted Computing" has only ever been realistically unidirectional in terms of favoring entrenched industry players. As a rule of thumb, if the primary benefactors of a feature are over 90% legal fictions; your feature ain't neutral. It's hostile to humanity. Period.
  - nullc 5mo ago
    "It’s a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways."
  - pigeons 5mo ago
    I think people are too quick to dismiss the possibility that some technologies are just bad and harmful and we can't shrug off responsibility and say I'm just making a neutral technology and the people using it are the ones causing harm.
  - eesmith 5mo ago
    Remote attestation is a policy, not a technology. The policy is "I will not let you access this system unless your system software implements this technological protection." A camera is technology. A security camera is policy, because it's a camera hooked up to policies on how to watch, record, and respond to what is required, and it is a political effort when connected with laws about face masks, prohibiting spray painting of the cameras, and allowing privacy intrusions.
  - paltor 5mo ago
    Different technologies may selectively amplify existing power. If the actions that it enables are disproportionately evil, it may at the very least be considered very useful for evil. Suppose someone invents a mind-reader that lets the user read the thoughts of anybody else in range. But the mind-reader requires great up-front costs to produce and also allows people with stronger readers to remotely destroy weaker readers, where strength is basically a function of cost. In a vacuum, the mind-reader is "just a technology". But it aids autocratic surveillance much more than it aids citizens who want to surveill back. It's "neutral" but its impact is decidedly not. TPMs and remote attestation enable entities with power to enforce their existing power much more effectively. In contrast, a general-purpose computer does the opposite because anybody can run whatever code they want, they can adversarially interoperate with anybody they feel like, and so on. One of these is more evil than the other, even though they're both "just technologies".
- zx8080 5mo ago
  The biggest problem is banking system. "Don't want - no bank for you". That's the problem.
  - Hackbraten 5mo ago
    Let them know. Write a letter to the CEO. And vote with your wallet and switch banks if you can. There's always a bank willing to offer you a non-app 2FA scheme.
    - brabel 5mo ago
      Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously? It helps prevent a lot of fraud. You are opposing something that saves people’s savings every day just because you think it takes “freedom” away from a few hobbyists. Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?
      - Hackbraten 5mo ago
        > Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously? What I'm claiming is that banks have the freedom of offering their customers 2FA other than smartphone apps. > Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical? All the phones I own, including my daily driver, run some flavor of Debian. None of them support hardware attestation. I'm in Europe, bound by PSD2, and own a couple of cheap, certified chip-and-TAN devices so I can do banking.
      - xinayder 5mo ago
        Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking? Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.
        Hackbraten 5mo ago
coppsilgold 5mo ago
There is a problem where it's becoming increasingly harder to determine which internet packets that are coming to your service are at the behest of a human in the course of normal activities or an automated program. If all the internet was is static content, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But we live in world where packets coming to your service result in significant state changes to your database (such as user generated content). I suspect that we are currently in the valley of do-something-about-it on the graph which is why you see all this angst from the big players. Would Google really care if automated programs were so good that they were approximating real humans to such an extent that absolutely no one can tell? I suspect they would not only be happy with such a state of affairs, they would join in.
- userbinator 5mo ago
  That's not a problem at all. It's an artificially created distraction, created to manufacture consent, by those pushing for this shit.
lxgr 5mo ago
You're not necessarily being surveiled just because you're forced to authenticate yourself. It often is the case practically, but it's not inherent, and mixing the two up makes the discussion too imprecise in a technical forum. Hardware attestation often also has problems of centralization, but that's something else as well. By just labeling it as an abstract bad thing without seeing nuance, I'm afraid you won't be convincing those in power to pass or block these laws, or those convincing your fellow voters which efforts to support.
- xinayder 5mo ago
  Those in power who need convincing are the same ones pushing for mass surveillance online.
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  > It often is the case practically, but it's not inherent Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel. Hardware attestation is a surveillance mechanism. If China was enforcing the same rule, you would immediately identify it as a state-driven deanonymization effort. But when the US does it, you backpedal and suggest that it could be implemented safely in a hypothetical alternate reality. Do you want to live in a dystopia?
  - lxgr 5mo ago
    > Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel. Who is? > But when the US does it [...] I don't live in the US, and while US is often setting global trends, in this case I don't think that's actually that likely, unless it somehow goes significantly better (i.e., the benefits actually vastly exceed the collateral damage to anonymity and resiliency via heterogeneity) than expected.
- zx8080 5mo ago
  > You're not necessarily being surveiled just because you're forced to authenticate yourself. Oh hell you do! Google profit comes from ADS! It's for their profit to surveil and track and deanonymize TO SELL ADS.
altairprime 5mo ago
How should a government act to prohibit misrepresentation of one’s characteristics online, from accessing services for which that government has formally defined regulations based on characteristic into law? If your answer is “they shouldn’t ever do that”, then you’re promoting an uncompromising position that governments are disinclined to adopt, being the primary user of identity issuance and verification on behalf of their citizens. If your answer is “they should do that differently”, then you have a discussion about (for example) ZKP or biosigs or etc., such as the thread you’re replying to. Which of these two paths are you here to discuss? I want to be sure I’ve correctly understood you to be arguing for the former in a thread about the latter.

userbinator 5mo ago

Hell yes. I was going to post the same comment. I don't give a flying fuck how it's implemented. Remote attestation is inherently evil. I remember the WEI apologists trying to do the same thing to derail the argument. The problem is the goal, not the details. Just say no: DO NOT WANT!

lxgr 5mo ago
Remote attestation is a technology, not a policy or a political effort, so it can't be inherently evil. You can disagree with all its known or proposed uses, but then I think it makes more sense to name these.
- userbinator 5mo ago
  Then explain why RA was invented? It is inherently against user freedom, just like "secure" boot and the rest of the corporate-authoritarian crap. People have woken up to the truth as the pieces come together. This article from 2022 is fun to look at and see how prescient it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106
  - MadnessASAP 5mo ago
    I have 2 servers, Alice and Bob, Bob has a secret, I want Bob to be able to share that secret with Alice. However, I want Alice to be able to prove to Bob that it is actually Alice, that it is running the correct AliceOS, and that AliceOS was loaded on bare metal Alice without nefarious pre-book or virtualization hooks. A TPM with measured boot (SecureBoot) does exactly this, remote attestation is how Alice proves to Bob that it is in a trusted configuration and wasn't tampered with.
    - brabel 5mo ago
      As someone who wanted to improve users security, that’s exactly why I find this thread fanatical opposition to attestation baffling. Nearly everyone uses a device that supports hardware attestation. It’s the best available tool to protect users from malware. We do implement a fallback that lowers security but lets the few users who have devices not able to attest properly to continue, but that really lowers security since we can’t even know if the device cryptography is itself compromised and hence can’t really trust anything it sends. If you have a different solution, do share it! I would love to use something you guys don’t find abhorrent! But until then I don’t really see the reason for all this negativity.
      - MadnessASAP 5mo ago
        Sadly, the problem isn't the TPM or Remote Attestation. It's Google et al choosing to only talk to devices and software they like without concern for what the user wants or trusts. Compounded by everyone else just going along with it. A TPM where the device owner can't take ownership of the root key is worse then no TPM at all.
      - superloika 5mo ago
        If the price to pay for security is freedom, then let users's devices be insecure. With time, they will learn good security hygiene. And if they don't, maybe they don't deserve it.
        PxldLtd 5mo ago
        I would be the safest citizen, free from experiencing crime and violence if I'm imprisoned in my house for life.
    - userbinator 5mo ago
      That's the academic viewpoint, but in practice it's used for far more hostile purposes. (One argues that since you own both of them, you should simply set up the two servers yourself with a key of your own choosing, asymmetric or otherwise, and then restrict physical access to them.)
- xinayder 5mo ago
  DRM is a technology and is inherently evil. Web attestation is DRM for the web, and is inherently evil. Age ID is a technology and is inherently evil. We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad. It's not like these technologies were created for the greater good and misappropriated by bad actors. They were proposed by bad actors in the first place, they cannot not be inherently good.
  - lxgr 5mo ago
    DRM is arguably a specific use of various generic technology ranging from whitebox cryptography to trusted computing. I don't think remote attestation (or even more so its umbrella technology, trusted computing) is nearly as specifically targeted as DRM. > We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad. I agree that requiring remote attestation for generic web use is evil. It's way too heavy-handed an approach better reserved I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself.
    - salawat 5mo ago
      >I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself. A technology squarely and 100% percent intended to give people other than the end user the ability to sleep soundly at night knowing those dastardly end users can't muck with their software (the non-end user) on their (the end user's) devices is only a tool for the authoritarian minded. Sorry mate, but if you're sitting here thinking it's useful and neutral, you are part of the problem, because you're eyes-wide-shutting the fact the only people gaining from the technology are those that already have a terrible trustworthy-ness record in terms of not abusing the sovereignty of another person's machine. Show me an industry that ships source code, and manuals with all software that runs on the device, along with hardware manuals and the manuals to write your own drivers and doesn't use hardware primitives to enforce their business models over you, then we can talk about an industry where "trusted computing" might be neutral to the end user. History has not seen this relationship bore out, however. The "Trust" in "Trusted Computing" has only ever been realistically unidirectional in terms of favoring entrenched industry players. As a rule of thumb, if the primary benefactors of a feature are over 90% legal fictions; your feature ain't neutral. It's hostile to humanity. Period.
- nullc 5mo ago
  "It’s a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways."
- pigeons 5mo ago
  I think people are too quick to dismiss the possibility that some technologies are just bad and harmful and we can't shrug off responsibility and say I'm just making a neutral technology and the people using it are the ones causing harm.
- eesmith 5mo ago
  Remote attestation is a policy, not a technology. The policy is "I will not let you access this system unless your system software implements this technological protection." A camera is technology. A security camera is policy, because it's a camera hooked up to policies on how to watch, record, and respond to what is required, and it is a political effort when connected with laws about face masks, prohibiting spray painting of the cameras, and allowing privacy intrusions.
- paltor 5mo ago
  Different technologies may selectively amplify existing power. If the actions that it enables are disproportionately evil, it may at the very least be considered very useful for evil. Suppose someone invents a mind-reader that lets the user read the thoughts of anybody else in range. But the mind-reader requires great up-front costs to produce and also allows people with stronger readers to remotely destroy weaker readers, where strength is basically a function of cost. In a vacuum, the mind-reader is "just a technology". But it aids autocratic surveillance much more than it aids citizens who want to surveill back. It's "neutral" but its impact is decidedly not. TPMs and remote attestation enable entities with power to enforce their existing power much more effectively. In contrast, a general-purpose computer does the opposite because anybody can run whatever code they want, they can adversarially interoperate with anybody they feel like, and so on. One of these is more evil than the other, even though they're both "just technologies".
zx8080 5mo ago
The biggest problem is banking system. "Don't want - no bank for you". That's the problem.
- Hackbraten 5mo ago
  Let them know. Write a letter to the CEO. And vote with your wallet and switch banks if you can. There's always a bank willing to offer you a non-app 2FA scheme.
  - brabel 5mo ago
    Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously? It helps prevent a lot of fraud. You are opposing something that saves people’s savings every day just because you think it takes “freedom” away from a few hobbyists. Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?
    - Hackbraten 5mo ago
      > Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously? What I'm claiming is that banks have the freedom of offering their customers 2FA other than smartphone apps. > Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical? All the phones I own, including my daily driver, run some flavor of Debian. None of them support hardware attestation. I'm in Europe, bound by PSD2, and own a couple of cheap, certified chip-and-TAN devices so I can do banking.
    - xinayder 5mo ago
      Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking? Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.
      - Hackbraten 5mo ago

coppsilgold 5mo ago

There is a problem where it's becoming increasingly harder to determine which internet packets that are coming to your service are at the behest of a human in the course of normal activities or an automated program. If all the internet was is static content, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But we live in world where packets coming to your service result in significant state changes to your database (such as user generated content). I suspect that we are currently in the valley of do-something-about-it on the graph which is why you see all this angst from the big players. Would Google really care if automated programs were so good that they were approximating real humans to such an extent that absolutely no one can tell? I suspect they would not only be happy with such a state of affairs, they would join in.

userbinator 5mo ago
That's not a problem at all. It's an artificially created distraction, created to manufacture consent, by those pushing for this shit.

lxgr 5mo ago

You're not necessarily being surveiled just because you're forced to authenticate yourself. It often is the case practically, but it's not inherent, and mixing the two up makes the discussion too imprecise in a technical forum. Hardware attestation often also has problems of centralization, but that's something else as well. By just labeling it as an abstract bad thing without seeing nuance, I'm afraid you won't be convincing those in power to pass or block these laws, or those convincing your fellow voters which efforts to support.

xinayder 5mo ago
Those in power who need convincing are the same ones pushing for mass surveillance online.
bigyabai 5mo ago
> It often is the case practically, but it's not inherent Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel. Hardware attestation is a surveillance mechanism. If China was enforcing the same rule, you would immediately identify it as a state-driven deanonymization effort. But when the US does it, you backpedal and suggest that it could be implemented safely in a hypothetical alternate reality. Do you want to live in a dystopia?
- lxgr 5mo ago
  > Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel. Who is? > But when the US does it [...] I don't live in the US, and while US is often setting global trends, in this case I don't think that's actually that likely, unless it somehow goes significantly better (i.e., the benefits actually vastly exceed the collateral damage to anonymity and resiliency via heterogeneity) than expected.
zx8080 5mo ago
> You're not necessarily being surveiled just because you're forced to authenticate yourself. Oh hell you do! Google profit comes from ADS! It's for their profit to surveil and track and deanonymize TO SELL ADS.

altairprime 5mo ago

How should a government act to prohibit misrepresentation of one’s characteristics online, from accessing services for which that government has formally defined regulations based on characteristic into law? If your answer is “they shouldn’t ever do that”, then you’re promoting an uncompromising position that governments are disinclined to adopt, being the primary user of identity issuance and verification on behalf of their citizens. If your answer is “they should do that differently”, then you have a discussion about (for example) ZKP or biosigs or etc., such as the thread you’re replying to. Which of these two paths are you here to discuss? I want to be sure I’ve correctly understood you to be arguing for the former in a thread about the latter.