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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

The argument they're making is obviously true, both in theory and in fact (look up how Best Buy repair technicians act as informants for the government).

>if Microsoft wants to make devices that nobody can service and repair without breaking their security model, they’re entitled to do that. They can make Surface Pros so hardened and tamper proof that merely opening them will destroy them.

>What they can’t do is make devices that are repairable, and then lock out everyone but their own service technicians.

There is no distinction here. The tamper proofing is what locks out everyone but their own service technicians.

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Will look this up. And not surprised.

Anecdotally, I went to Best Buy for an iPhone screen replacement (a year ago in nyc), the tech wanted my pin code, I of course declined. Their reasoning was that they needed it for their test fixture to make sure the replacement worked. I declined again. The tech said that in that case they would have to wipe my phone, I said that’s fine and much preferred to the alternative.

When I came back a few hours later to get my device, it had not been wiped, and the new screen worked just fine.

I was always curious why the heck would they need my pin!

I imagine >95% give their pin.

The last time my family repaired an iPad, I backed up the thing and wiped it, only setting up enough stuff to keep it from being stolen.

That's a lot of work and takes quite a bit of time.

> The argument they're making is obviously true, both in theory and in fact (look up how Best Buy repair technicians act as informants for the government).

I can also look up how repair technicians have affixed GPS trackers to cars or defrauded consumers during repairs. But I'm still glad that I can take my car to a non-manufacturer repair shop.

The "TPM's are all going to fail" argument is the "terrorists will win" argument, except for HN instead of regular citizens. In most cases this is an unnecessary conflict -- compromising the TPM wouldn't be necessary for many of the repairs consumers want to make.

From the article:

> After all, TPMs are in Dell computers. Dell makes diagnostic software and diagnostic codes and schematics available for their hardware and I haven’t heard Microsoft or anybody else suggest that a TPM on a repairable Dell laptop is any less secure than the TPM on an unrepairable Microsoft Surface.

We could make a lot of progress on right to repair without ever coming in conflict with existing TPMs. If that's Microsoft's concern, then fine -- I'm OK starting with the noncontroversial, unsecured stuff first, like keyboards, glass, and batteries.

  We could make a lot of progress
  on right to repair without ever
  coming in conflict with existing
  TPMs.

Maybe not TPMs - but the iPhone Secure Enclave is going to crop up pretty early in any such discussions, after iOS 9 disabled iphones where a third party replaced the home/touch id button [1] - often because a broken screen had been replaced. A later apple update walked this back to merely permanently disabling touch id and apple pay on such phones.

[1] https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iphone/what-is-iphone-err...

You're right that iPhone is an interesting case, but even with iPhone we could still make a lot of progress.

To be clear, I do not have a lot of sympathy for Apple's arguments around secure enclave. As far as I'm concerned, right-to-repair is a tangible issue that effects nearly everyone, and having the government install a separate touch id button is a largely theoretical risk for most people. But, even the iPhone has parts that aren't effected by secure enclave -- so if it takes this argument off the table, I'm willing to let it go.

We still have Apple blocking replacement parts as counterfeits when they enter the country; and we still have a bunch of diagnostic information, specs, and tools that are only available to authorized technicians.

It's also worth noting that Error 53 wasn't forcing consumers to make a choice between the fingerprint reader and a 3rd-party screen replacement -- it was "bricking" the phone. That Apple was willing to roll that back and change their design so that Secure Enclave only disabled fingerprints, says to me that even Apple has admitted that secure enclave doesn't need to monitor every single part of their phones to keep consumers safe.

They could also make them merely tamper-evident. There's plenty of ways to allow device owners to unlock their own devices, without also letting others do so. Manufacturers just aren't interested in that, and are all to happy to lie and claim it's impossible.

> There's plenty of ways to allow device owners to unlock their own devices, without also letting others do so.

Such as?

My Android phone checks software integrity on boot, but I can override it if I want to install a custom ROM.

The setting can only be changed from within the OS, so an attacker or service technician can't do it without my permission. Some[0] Android phones even allow you to re-lock the bootloader afterwards by replacing the chain of trust, so as far as I know there's no technical reason why we couldn't have the best of both worlds.

[0]: But not all of them. Don't blindly re-lock your bootloader unless you know for certain that your phone supports it, or you'll risk basically bricking your device.

The mentioned tamper-evident-ness. E.g. the device can display at boot time a warning if any changes were made, or if keys were added to the trusted list. Adding extra keys can easily be locked behind a password that the owner can change.

Note that this is not hypothetical - lots of unlockable Android phones will display a warning that they were rooted on boot.

> There is no distinction here.

Yes there is. The question is now "how does MSFT decide _who_ gets the right to repair their devices?"

If it's a reasonable and non-discriminatory process, then that might be fine, if they're arbitrarily deciding, then that's likely an issue the FTC _should_ investigate.

I need to get a repair authorized in 20 years. Can I still do it?

Deciding who gets the right is the very definition of discrimination.

Microsoft does exactly that, they're called Secure Access Workstations, and they're used for all sensitive work. You can find some details here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/sec...

They're described as PAWs in the document, but they are called SAWs internally (as one of the notes explains down the page).

> There is no distinction here. The tamper proofing is what locks out everyone but their own service technicians.

Then what locks out their own service technicians? Does Microsoft not comply with government requests, and give some promise of that in an enforceable way? Would a court even enforce such a promise?

I fail to see any reason why someone should trust Microsoft any more than Best Buy. And even then what forces you to give your device to Best Buy instead of someone you do trust?

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