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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it's a cynical way to look at it, but in the days of the war on general purpose computing, and locked-down devices, I have to consider the news in terms of how it could be used against the users and device owners. I don't know enough to provide useful analysis so I won't try, but instead pose as questions to the much smarter people who might have some interesting thoughts to share.

There are two, non-exclusive paths I'm thinking at the moment:

1. DRM: Might this enable a next level of DRM?

2. Hardware attestation: Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?

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Just to level set here. I think its important to realize this is really focused on allowing things like search to operate on encrypted data. This technique allows you to perform an operation on the data without decrypting it. Think a row in a database with email, first, last, and mailing address. You want to search by email to retrieve the other data, but don't want that data unencrypted since it is PII.

In general, this solution would be expensive and targeted at data lakes, or areas where you want to run computation but not necessarily expose the data.

With regard to DRM, one key thing to remember is that it has to be cheap, and widely deployable. Part of the reason dvds were easily broken is that the algorithm chosen was inexpensive both computationally, so you can install it on as many clients as possible.

This is an exceptionally good point. For example, I suspect two major reasons DRM has been more successful on game consoles than video players are the much smaller ecosystems and much larger BOMs, not necessarily in that order.

DVD players also didn't have a great key revocation and forced field updates of keys and software and such. Blu Ray did, and was somewhat more effective. I also imagine console manufacturers have far more control over the supply chain at large.

Consoles after the original Xbox (which had an epic piracy ecosystem) all had online integration. The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only. The Xbox One has had no such breaches that I am aware of.

RE: BOM - famously, with many of these examples, certain specific disc drives or mainboards were far more compromised than others.

Home networks have made this much easier. DVD players didn’t expect network access for software updates etc…

> The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only.

You could play pirated games online with the 360. The piracy was at the DVD Rom firmware level, replacing the stock firmware with one that basically changed the book type of the media. (And in later versions also mimicked other security checks preformed by the console to validate the authenticity of the disk)

However the DVD firmware mod didn’t break any digital signatures. It just allowed signed code to be executed from unauthentic media, so it only allowed piracy/backups not a full jailbreak allowing unsigned code. That was more the jtag/reset glitch era. Which was more “offline only” as it was easier for MS to detect and ban your key vault from Xbox live, but because people were willing to pay for modded lobbies in games like Call of Duty (which allowed you to rank up much faster) and Xbox dying if you sneezed that them, there was a even a market for extracting the keys from dead consoles to sell to those selling modded lobbies.

You still ran a risk of getting your console hardware banned for doing the DVD firmware mod, but towards the end I believe MS threw in the towel (even after trying to embed the flash chip in the samr package as the DSP for the drive which resulted in the kamikaze hack before the drive got further exploited) because one method they tried to use to detect piracy had such tight tolerances that it caused legit customers with aging drives to be caught up in the ban wave and MS had to walk it back.

The head of Xbox security (who sadly is no longer with us, he was a good egg at heart) left Microsoft not long afterwards. Obviously stating he wanted to move on to other things, but the word around the community at the time was that he was shown the door.

Personally I don’t hold much to that story (of him being pushed), this was so late in the consoles life that it seemed like it was trying to patch the hole in the titanic after it already sunk.

How is searching encrypted data not going to be used for exfiltration? What a terrible idea.

I’m sure you can name benign useful things you could use it for. But it seems to me you’re blatantly overlooking the obvious flaw.

There is no getting around doing search on encrypted data reducing the level of secrecy. To have an even minutely useful search result, some information within the searched corpus must be exposed.

> how it could be used against the users and device owners

Same here.

Can't wait to KYC myself in order to use a CPU.

KYC = Kill Your Conscience

It's truly amazing how modern people just blithely sacrifice their privacy and integrity for no good reason. Just to let big tech corporations more efficiently siphon money out of the market. And then they fight you passionately when you call out those companies for being unnecessarily invasive and intrusive.

The four horsemen of the infocalypse are such profoundly reliable boogeymen, we really need a huge psychological study across all modern cultures to see why they're so effective at dismantling rational thought in the general public, and how we can innoculate society against it without damaging other important social behaviors.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-05-27

They probably meant "know your customer", you know, where you have to submit to an anal probe to think about getting a bank account and withdrawing more than $8 of cash at a time will trigger a suspicious activity report for money laundering/tax evasion while the Epstein class are getting away with the most heinous crimes possible.

KYC is generally a force for good because it prevents fraud. While it is not reasonable for Discord to collect your identity that is a fair requirement for a bank account because money laundering is a serious problem worth preventing.

The reason the 'Epstein class' are able to get away with crimes is because in recent US elections the US voted to elect politicions that intentionally are not investigating those crimes and even pardoned some criminals convicted of them.

Don’t pardoned people by definition need to have been convicted of a crime whether real or in some select instances otherwise? Can you pardon someone not convicted of a (federal) crime?

Yes, the last president pardoned himself and his family on his way out.

I’m not sure if that has precedent. It’s unusual to grant a pardon before a case is brought to court.

In any event, my point was all presidents who grant pardons grant them to people convicted of a crime; it’s not a recent development. But that was framed as being upsetting precedent.

Preemptive pardons have been used in recent history.

https://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/amp/preemptive-pardon...

Not according to Ex parte Garland (1866).

> 9. The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

Basically you can't pardon acts that haven't happened yet, but you can pardon before any legal action has been taken on prior acts.

>KYC is generally a force for good because it prevents fraud

Now replace KYC with CCTV surveillance because thats what it really is. Complete Monetary surveillance and control to fight a boogeyman scapegoat it doesn't even actually effect.

I'm still waiting for the first password manager to incorporate biometrics and security questions, as predicted decades ago by Douglas Adams:

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

The saying is "every accusation is a confession". If the political class claims to be preventing us from doing something that we obviously are not doing, we should assume they're doing that thing until proven otherwise.

> how it could be used against the users

We are not anymore their clients, we are just another product to sell. So, they do not design chips for us but for the benefit of other corporations.

3. Unskippable ads with data gathering at the CPU level.

I distinctly remember from university in one of my more senior classes designing logic gates, chaining together ands, nands, ors, nors, xors, and then working our way up to numerical processors, ALUs, and eventually latches, RAM, and CPUs. The capstone was creating an assembly to control it all.

I remember how thinking how fun it was! I could see unfolded before me how there would be endless ways to configure, reconfigure, optimize, etc.

I know there are a few open source chip efforts, but wondering maybe now is the time to pull the community together and organize more intentionally around that. Maybe open source chipsets won't be as fast as their corporate counterparts, but I think we are definitely at an inflection point now in society where we would need this to maintain freedom.

If anyone is working in that area, I am very interested. I am very green, but still have the old textbooks I could dust off (just don't have the ole college provided mentor graphics -- or I guess siemens now -- design tool anymore).

Sounds like you might want to go play with RISC-V, either in hardware or emulation.

I was just thinking about this a few days ago, but not just for the CPU (which we have RISC-V and OpenPOWER), but for an entire system, including the GPU, audio, disk controllers, networking, etc. I think a great target would be mid-2000s graphics and networking; I could go back to a 2006 Mac Pro without too much hardship. Having a fully-open equivalent to mid-2000s hardware would be a boon for open computing.

There's no point. The big chip makers control all the billion dollar fabs. Governments and corporations can easily dictate terms. We'll lose this battle unless we develop a way to cheaply fabricate chips in a garage.

The future is bleak.

Make one out of relays and use it to run PGP

I don't think it's applicable to DRM because you eventually need the decrypted content: DRM is typically used for books, music, video, etc., you can't enjoy an encrypted video.

I think eGovernment is the main use case: not super high traffic (we're not voting every day), but very high privacy expectations.

Yes it must be decrypted eventually, but I've read about systems (I think HDMI does this) where the keys are stored in the end device (like the TV or monitor) that the user can't access. Given that we already have that, I think I agree that this news doesn't change anything, but I wonder if there are clever uses I haven't thought of

Rent out your spare compute, like seti@home or folding@home, but it’s something someone could repackage and sell as a service.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323743

It's not related to DRM or trusted computing.

Not yet.

What does that even mean?

A: "Intel/AMD is adding instructions to accelerate AES"

B: "Might this enable a next level of DRM? Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?"

A: "wtf are you talking about? It's just instructions to make certain types of computations faster, it has nothing to do with DRM or hardware attestation."

B: "Not yet."

I'm sure in some way it probably helps DRM or hardware attestation to some extent, but not any more than say, 3nm process node helps DRM or hardware attestation by making it faster.

If this were similar to SGX (which is what I initially assumed) then "not yet" is a perfectly reasonable position to take. However it's actually homomorphic encryption implemented in hardware thus not relevant to DRM (AFAIK).

That said, the unfortunate reality is that the same constructs that underpin DRM are also required to build a secure system. The only difference is who controls the root of trust. As such the problems with DRM (and hardware ownership more generally) are political as opposed to technical in nature.

I see the same thing every time there's a new medical thing.

> We discovered a substance that boosts your innate immune system and non-specifically clears out throat infections.

> This will be good for people prone to throat infections.

> Not when it's mandated.

someone else told me they're going to spy on your windows with drones to make sure you're verifying your age to your OS, like what??? I thought we were waking up to oppression but we're just inventing fake oppression to be mad at instead of responding to real oppression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

I mean, this would be perfect for the key provisioning portions of widevine or bluray.

Regarding DRM I don't see how it'll survive "Camera in front of the screen" + "AI video upscaling" once the second part is good enough. Can't DRM between the screen and your eyes. Until they put DRM in Neuralink.

> Can't DRM between the screen and your eyes.

No, but media can be watermarked in imperceptible ways, and then if all players are required to check and act on such watermarks, the gap becomes narrow enough to probably be effective.

See Cinavia.

Sure, but we already have good enough players, open source even, that don't support this technology, and recent codecs have, if anything, become more open, so this only seems problematic for playback on non-general purpose computing devices like smart TVs, set top boxes, and maybe smartphones, tablets, and battery-powered PCs if the tech is incorporated into hardware decoders for all acceptable codecs.

> if all players are required

Massive if. Why would I voluntarily purchase gimped hardware?

Cinavia depended on being implemented by the player itself. It's difficult to see how (for example) a smart tv could implement it for streams coming in via HDMI from a computer the user has full control of.

You would purchase a Blu-ray player in order to play Blu-rays, pretty simple. They have this watermarking.

Right. To play legally purchased blu-rays. Who pirates movies and then burns them on a disk? And if someone did do that why would they be using a gimped blu-ray player instead of a media PC?

The only thing this scheme was ever going to catch was full blown counterfeit disks sold on a street corner to your average joe. I think that was only ever much of a thing in the developing world. Or was it just before my time?

The idea would be that when you see a recording of a Blu-ray, you can track down who bought the Blu-ray. However that part was never implemented. However it WAS implemented on Netflix which is why pirates don't like using Netflix as a source. Any time a pirated movie is released from a Netflix source, that person gets blacklisted from Netflix because it's watermarked with their user ID.

Really? I see no mention of that for Cinava and don't see how that could have worked in practical terms.

I'm aware of what Netflix and other streaming services do. That actually makes sense.

Macrovision is a crude DRM scheme that was required by law to exist in all VCRs towards the end of their time in the 90s. Requiring TVs to check for and only display video for streams that present a certificate through such an embedded data stream could simply be called "Macrovision Next Generation Content Assurance."

Sure, setting aside notions of common sense and accountability to the public a western government could hypothetically impose the equivalent (inverse?) of the EURion constellation on all digital displays. Of course you'd also need to patch the hole of authorized devices (ex laptops) running FOSS video players playing back pirated streams. Which is to say that it doesn't actually solve the "problem" unless it turns into a full blown war on general purpose computing.

But wait! Even that's not good enough because my (now illicit) pirate box can present the stream embedded in a webpage for the locked down device that I don't control to play back on the DRM'd TV. So I guess now we're also going to want a scheme to prevent government approved devices from establishing network connections with unapproved ones?

Okay thinking about it some more it could be made to work provided that the watermarks could be either muxed or rewritten by devices in the middle of the chain. However the entire thing would be a bit on the complex side, would require reendcoding a given video stream in real time on the fly at each relevant point (ex at the streaming service CDN edge node and then again at the client device), and would most likely be rendered pointless unless all display devices were legally mandated to require the presence of the watermark in order to function.

Keep in mind that distributors absolutely do not want to reencode video per client at the edge. IIUC they go a long way out of their way to avoid ever having to do that, with the current watermarking scheme working by randomly selecting chunks to send from two or more pre-encoded video streams.

Meanwhile AI appears poised to give us unlimited approximately free (plus a few kW hours) entertainment at least assuming it doesn't end up somehow killing us all.

1. The private key is required to see anything computed under FHE, so DRM is pretty unlikely.

2. No, anyone can run the FHE computations anywhere on any hardware if they have the evaluation key (which would also have to be present in any FHE hardware).

HDCP does some of that already in many of your devices.

My thought is half cynical. As LLM crawlers seek to mop up absolutely everything, companies themselves start to worry more about keeping their own data secret. Maybe this is a reason for shifts like this; as encrypted and other privacy-preserving products become more in demand across the board.

I'm also thinking of what happens when quantum computing becomes available.

But when homomorphic encryption becomes efficient, perhaps governments can force companies to apply it (though they would lose their opportunity for backdooring, but E2EE is a thing too so I wouldn't worry too much).

When we are at the point where society feels the need that privacy means encryption at compute ... a product like this (or anything else in the supply chain) is not going to save them.

No, because of the fundamental limitation of DRM. Content must be delivered as plaintext.

This is quite the opposite, better than we have.

It raises the hurdle for those looking to surveil.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is primarily for cloud compute I'd imagine, AI specifically. As it's generally not feasible/possible to run the state of the art models locally. Think GDPR and data sovereignty concerns, many demand privacy and can't use services without it.

Regarding DRM, You could use stream ciphers and other well understood cryptography schemes to use a FHE chip like this to create an effectively tamper-proof and interception proof OS, with the FHE chip supplementing normal processors. You'd basically be setting up e2ee between the streaming server and the display, audio output, or other stream target, and there'd be no way to intercept or inspect unencrypted data without breaking the device. Put in modern tamper detection and you get a very secure setup, with modern performance, and a FHE chip basically just handling keys and encapsulation operations, fairly low compute and bandwidth needs. DRM and attestation both, as well as fairly dystopian manufacturer and corporate controls over devices users should own.

You’re right it’s a cynical take. I don’t get cynicism for the sake of it, detached from technical reality.

No, this does nothing for DRM or HW attestation. The interesting thought is: not everything is a conspiracy. Yes, that’s just what a conspirator would say. But it’s also true.

Not everything is a conspiracy, yes. But when we have a class of conspirators in power, and we do have, everything can be used by the conspiracy.

No. When you order a vanilla ice cream cone and the underpaid server is like “sorry, we’re out of vanilla”, it is NOT a reasonable response to weave a conspiracy theory about billionaires.

There are conspiracies and abuses, for sure. That does not mean that every single annoyance is a sign of a conspiracy.

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