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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

I read this as:

Step 1: Microsoft Pluton

Step 2: ...

Step 3: Eating Babies

You've taken a perfectly legitimate requirement in modern computing environments: The need to secure against attacks end to end, from the software you're running, through the entire ecosystem, even to the supply chain, and extending it to something nefarious.

Sure, it could be used to create a world where no one can run unapproved code. Or it could be used to create a world where you can OPT IN to running approved or unapproved code. e.g. iOS vs Android side-loading.

Consumers will likely retain the choice, on Windows, to override the system and run unsafe code. However enterprise / managed computer systems likely will prevent it. I mean what security team or sysadmin wants office workers to be able to install and run arbitrary code on corporate machines or networks?

Let's try to avoid catastrophizing everything.

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> You've taken a perfectly legitimate requirement in modern computing environments: The need to secure against attacks end to end, from the software you're running, through the entire ecosystem, even to the supply chain, and extending it to something nefarious.

If the way to achieve end to end security is by giving full control to someone else then I don't think that's worth it.

It is a catastrophe if people end up losing control of their systems like they have with phones and consoles.

A system that you have total control over is a system that you are totally responsible for administrating.

Most people don't want that. Most people don't have time for that. For them, an Xbox that can browse web , run Office, and play streamers, remotely administered by a company with name recognition and trust like Microsoft, is enough. And that even goes for many Hackernews; if I had a nickel for everytime I've heard something like "Oh, desktop Linux? No thank you, that's for college students with plenty of time on their hands. I'm a professional dev, but I have kids and a mortgage so I need something that Just Works." I could buy a fancy meal for me and my girlfriend with the proceeds.

A big part of Just Works in today's pervasively interconnected world involves delegating the security of your device to a third party, either your company's IT or Apple, Microsoft, or Google for personal devices.

Remote attestation has been hypothesized about for decades, and its implications have been thoroughly pondered. The entirety of its functionality is to allow remote parties you're interacting with to know exactly what software you're running. This totally destroys the idea of independent parties each running software that represents their own interests, with neutral protocols mediating between them. So yes, it is perfectly reasonable to indict the technology based on its straightforward implication of further exacerbating existing power imbalances.

You're assuming the host/client relationship is one way, and that the parties are "independent". In many cases I've seen proposed in research, remote attestation is used to secure a single-party app that is spread over multiple devices that the runs their app on.

For example, if I run an app, which also requires me to run some code in a container in a data center, I as the client, want to remotely attest that the code in the data center is not running in a tampered fashion.

Or perhaps I have my watch, AR glasses, and phone are collaborating, and these three devices come from different manufacturers, and are running different software, and I want to ensure that none of them has been tampered with.

And let's not forget IoT devices, which are the killer application I've seen suggested for remote attestation.

"with neutral protocols mediating between them". Protocols aren't implementations. There are cases when I am interacting with someone else and I want them to prove their identity to me, including the identity of their software. Maybe I'm running a supposedly secure chat client in an authoritarian state, and I want to know that the chat client they're running isn't a trojan they got from a government security service.

You don't need remote attestation to get to the bad places you suggestion. App Stores have been like that for years without attestation. Consoles have been closed down for decades. Relatively simple, unsophisticated copy protection can prevent most people from running what they want, no fancy crypto protocols needed.

> You're assuming the host/client relationship is one way, and that the parties are "independent".

Yes I am, because that is the alarming case. A main use of the "end to end" integrity you talk about will be from powerful centralized companies right to people's eyeballs and fingertips, thus computationally disenfranchising individuals.

It's cute to be able to get better security properties out of a cloud host [0], but not really germane to the larger societal effects. And to be honest these things sound like a solution looking for problems. Clouds are for non-personal data only. Devices from different manufacturers should still be representing me and therefore not mutually suspicious. The Internet of Trash is a problem due to lack of updates and open protocols, not a lack of centralized control over those devices.

> You don't need remote attestation to get to the bad places you suggest

The ill effects you're describing are created by the original "innovation" of treacherous computing, the locked down platform. To solidify that regime of control, you need to keep non-locked-out devices out. That is where remote attestation comes in.

Right now if a powerful party that I need to interact with demands to know what software my device is running, I can lie, and make sure my custom client follows what they're expecting so they don't know the difference. They can up the game and lock their client down more and more, but ultimately once someone gets it to spill its secrets, it's fair game for open access. Remote attestation is then a security vulnerability such that I cannot use a third party client and lie about it.

In general authoritarianism always looks appealing and will always be framed in terms of the benefits it brings. But it's an anathema to open society that will inevitably be abused by bad actors.

[0] furthermore you can never discount that as power coalesces, large businesses won't get exceptions to break various security properties for various necessary-sounding reasons. So independent actors won't even be able to rely on the claimed security properties.

But that is EXACTLY what we're going to end up with. In this case, past performance really does imply future actions.

Really? So I can't run unsigned software on Windows these days?

There was at least 3 attempts from Microsoft in the past to do just this (Windows RT, S and X).

So while you can still run unsigned software on x86 on Windows today, if Microsoft previous attempts at ARM machines had succeeded, it would have been indeed impossible to run unsigned software on some Windows installations.

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