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Comment by cwillu | Hacker News Reader

The entire point is to protect against those (like the owner of the hardware) who have physical access.

So basically this is the best kind of vuln; not exploitable remotely, and unpatchable so you will always be able to get root on your own hardware.

AMD has patches for all impacted platforms, and a method to verify that patch has been applied.

a method that can't be spoofed though?

TAO tho...

I think this type of implements are also used to make payments work on devices, in addition to enabling DRM.

In that case it doesn't seem it's really the "owner" of that hardware..

The operators own the hardware and lease it to customers for computation. Those customers do not trust the operators to not peek at their Super Sensitive Data. TEE is a way for the operator to provide assurances to their customers that they will not, and more importantly cannot, exfiltrate customer data.

This is in theory. In practice, as demonstrated by the article, these assurances are not bulletproof.

This makes sense for enterprise use cases, but then the soc manufacturer shouldn't be able to do this as well.. otherwise customers still need to trust the manufacturer.

So I was referring to the case where there exists an entity that has some equivalent of "private keys" that makes it possible to control the TEE/attestation..

Ah that makes sense.

I would think as long as the manufacturer and the operator are not the same entity then the danger in that regard would be mitigated.

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