It looks like finally users may have complete control over their Intel computers without Intel having the final say. I, for one, am quite happy about this.
The idea is not to "take control over people's computers", i.e. your trust in your own computer. It is rather to enable somebody to gain some level of trust in the computations that are happening on somebody else's computer.
Yes, this technology is commonly used for DRM, and that was one of its earliest applications. But it's not limited to that. Trusted computing can switch the roles and give you as a user certainty over the computations a third party provider performs in the cloud on your behalf. The Signal team is doing a lot of very interesting experiments there [1].
If your concern is a hardware backdoor or something similar, this is less of a question of trusted computing, and rather one of trust in hardware vendors. Your hardware vendor can screw you over entirely without TPM, TEE, secure elements and the like.
On the other hand, Intel's trusted computing platform being horribly broken does not magically give you FOSS replacements for all the firmware, ROMs and microcode running on the dozens of peripherals in your computer.
Yes they can, but as I understand it they are using TPM to screw us over, hence people celebrating its being popped. No misunderstanding of trusted computing necessary: there aren't, in practice, other vendors to choose from here.
I do see that the existence of both trusted and untrusted systems could exert some pressure on consumers to adopt the latter, due to the unavailability of certain services on the former (e.g. DRM, banking apps on rooted Android phones etc).
The danger here is a loss of "freedom to tinker", which I do appreciate very much, and I share that concern. But has that actually happened with TPM?
the TPM is a PASSIVE component. It only responds to your requests and you can do cool things with it.
There are a lot of possibilities with distributed computing
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and I don’t really know how to do it without one of those two things.
Edit: like I hear you saying there are possibilities in a distributed computing world, but I don’t have any idea what distributed computing enables for key recovery (except possibly k of n schemes but that’s just replication, not safety).
Edit 2: also, presume that users suck at key management and can’t remember long password strings, 24 words, or be trusted to store a key for a meaningful period of time.
Do you have an example of such an enclave and how it would operate without a remote attention service in the model where a user can trust that a distributed network they don’t control is safeguarding their key?
(But I suppose that just proves your point.)
Trusted platforms are pretty interesting IMO in their ability to essentially provide FHE by means of tamper-resistance instead of mathematical security. Objections should be more directed at the control of keys being with Intel; maybe some other orgs should be in charge, maybe there could be a number of trust vendors you could choose, or at least veto (and allow external users of your external platform to choose). Something more in line with TLS authentication: we all need to trust 3rd parties to use the internet, and nobody protests -- with good reason. It's a well designed, open, decentralized system with good oversight.
Is signal moving towards some sort of key escrow policy?
DRM lets users watch Netflix on their phones while on an airplane.
Hardware key storage significantly decreases the attack surface for malware trying to extract them, compared to storing them on the application processor.
How is the average user being fucked here, exactly?
No, DRM exists to restrict users, it does not enable anything for them.
But this is exactly the idea of trusted computing:
"Prove to me that I can trust your hardware to run my software according to my specifications, and I will use it to compute things (for our mutual benefit) that I would otherwise only compute on my own hardware."
DRM is the canonical example, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to actually know that cloud service provider has to adhere to their terms of service, rather than having to take their word for it?
(The big "if" here is that the terms of service are expressible and enforceable in the context of some piece of software.)
As a user - why should I trust your software with my computer?
There is great imbalance of power, the companies aren't necessarily the good guys. It already got unfair with DRM, for example together with DMCA is effectively blocking fair use, like ability to make own backup copy of purchased medium, or purchasing it once and being able to play the content on multiple devices.
It also prevents one from being able to sell their copy to someone else which also is allowed by law.
hardware encryption is arguably a better use of TEE, but as far as I know, no actual implementations use SGX for that purpose. the TPM is used, but it's not fast enough for actual encryption. the OS loads the keys from the TPM and does the encryption in regular software.