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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, a DICE-enhanced TPM would be just as evil as a regular TPM I'm afraid. You can think of DICE as giving you a gazillion TPMs for the price of one actual TPM, one per program you care to load. What would happen is, your bootloader would just inject the standard Treacherous Computing™ firmware into the TPM, and since its keys is tied to it being what it is, in the end you end up with a regular Treacherous Platform Module, same as today.

I would _love_ to stop programs from using my TPM against me, but I'm afraid DICE isn't it.

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> Their motivation however was different: they wanted to better protect the device secret. Many devices store their secret in a fuse bank, and changing it is often impossible. Leaking it is especially bad, because it can render the entire device forever unusable: no one wants an HSM with a leaked secret, or a remote IoT device that can be impersonated.

A computer I cannot choose what software I run and what state I expose to the software, and allow the software to impersonate the original software, is a SafetyNet locked-down device controlled by the owner of the TPM keys and programs running on it.

I’m sorry, did you reply to the wrong comment? Or did you quote the wrong quote? I genuinely can’t make link your response with either my previous comment or what you just quoted.

Taken in isolation your sentence is correct, I agree 100% with it: of course I want control over what runs on my computer. Of course the TPM is often used to steal that control away from me. Of course that is bad.

What made you think I don’t think that?

I'm not upset at you, I'm agreeing with the comment you wrote. But since I found out you're the author of the article, I find it odd you're now upset about the idea of TPMs and remote attestation, when your article praises an alternative TPM architecture fully capable of remote attestations and disobeying the user.

I see, I may have separated those two subjects a bit too much. The TPM is two things: evil, and bloated. This post focused on the "bloated" part, with only the slightest recognition of the evil at the very end of my post. I understand it therefore looks like I'm approving the evils of the TPM.

The evil part would need its own post, but frankly, other people have addressed this part much better than I ever could. Cory Doctorow's talk on The Coming War on General Computation is as relevant as ever.

Even then, TPM-like hardware can still be useful to me as a user, even if my computer is 100% Free Software. It is a shame though that its main use is stripping me of my freedoms instead.

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