In the past, when you had a proprietary tool you needed to use to do something, people could analyze and reimplement it. The reasons to do that varied - someone needed "muh freedomz", someone else wanted to do the thing on an unsupported platform, someone else wanted to change something in the way the tool worked (perhaps annoyed by paper jams)... Eventually you could end up with an interoperable FLOSS reimplementation. This has happened with lots of various things - IMs, network service clients, appliance drivers, even operating systems, and this is how people like me could switch away from Windows and have their computers (and later phones) remain fully functional in the society around us, perhaps with minor annoyances, but without real showstoppers.
Remote attestation changes this dynamic drastically. Gaim (Pidgin), Kadu couldn't be made if the service provider like AIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu etc. could determine whether you're using the Official App™ from the Official Store™ on the Official OS™ and just refuse to handle requests from your reimplementation. They could still try and be hostile to you without it, and often did, but it wasn't an uneven fight. Currently we're still in the early days and you can still go by in the society by defaulting to use services on the Web, using plastic card instead of phone for payments etc. but this is already changing. And it's not just a matter of networked services either - I bet we're going to see peripheral devices refusing to be driven by non-attested implementations too.
Secure boot chains have some value and are worth having, but not when they don't let the user be in charge (or let the user delegate that to someone else) and when they prioritize the security of "apps" rather than users. The ability for us as users to lie to the apps is actually essential to preserving our agency. Without that we're screwed, as now to connect ourselves to the fabric of the society we'll need to find and exploit vulnerabilities that are going to be patched as soon as they become public.
The same freedom is being abused by malicious actors. Even on Windows (like BlackLotus), but also on pre-infected phones emptying people's bank accounts. This is an incredibly unfortunate outcome, but what's the solution?
I see no other potential outcome than that free computing and trusted computing are going to be totally separate. Possibly even on the same device, but not in a way that lets anyone tamper with it.
Most importantly - it's the user who needs to know whether their system has been tampered with, not apps.
False analogy. You can’t have your kitchen knife exploited by a hacker team in North Korea, who shotgun attacks half of the public Internet infrastructure and uses the proceeds to fund the national nuclear program, can you? (I somewhat exaggerate, but you get the idea.)
> Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control
In an ideal world where users have infinite information and infinite capability to process and internalize it to become an infosec expert, sure. I don’t know about you, but most of us don’t live in that world.
I agree it’s not perfect. Having to use liquid glass and being unable to install custom watch faces is ridiculous. There’s probably an opportunity for a hardened OS which can be trusted by interested parties to not be maliciously altered, and also not force so many constraints onto users like current walled gardens do. But a fully open OS, plus an ordinary user who has no time or willingness to casually become a tptacek on the side, in addition to completely unrelated full-time job that’s getting more competitive due to LLMs and whatnot, seems more like a disaster than utopia.
Isn’t the status quo, that you need to intentionally choose to allow this?
It's also really incredible how people can see "user being in control" and just immediately jump to "user having to be an infosec expert", as if one implied the other. You can't really discuss things in good faith in such climate :(
Your ID card is on your phone. Go ahead, guarantee you’re not using a duplicate of someone else’s ID card, that no one could duplicate your card, with a mainstream widely available consumer phone.
> I can also guarantee a secure boot chain with my patched bootloader.
Go ahead, show how your grandma automatically guarantees to interested parties that I or whoever else didn’t patch her bootloader to run a backdoored OS, while using a mainstream widely available consumer phone.
> Neither of these things require apps to verify the environment they run in.
Demonstrate a mainstream, widely available consumer phone that does these things without requiring apps to verify the environment they run it.
We can continue this infinitely, but if you keep making sweeping contrarian statements without contributing the proof required then it’s just not worth it.
No, it's not. It lays on the desk next to me right now. I can communicate with it over NFC and I can't duplicate it. There's a debit card next to it and the same applies there - though it can also be communicated with by using a smartcard reader, which can't be done with my ID.
> guarantees to interested parties
The only interested party is my grandma, and she'll come to me to help her because her phone will stop working when the boot chain gets compromised (as it should).
> Demonstrate a mainstream, widely available consumer phone that does these things without requiring apps to verify the environment they run it.
Pretty much all of them today? Letting apps verify the environment is an extra feature built on top of secure boot chains, not the other way around. We're only having this discussion because having secure boot chains enables app attestation to work in the first place, and letting the user patch things is just a matter of key management policies. If you think these are "sweeping contrarian statements", you may want to spend some time learning how these things work.
This is not a technical problem, technical aspects have been already solved a long time ago. This is a social/political problem of who holds power over whom.
Some countries do :) Though I think physical analogies are misleading in a lot of ways here.
> Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control, and some risks are just not worth eliminating.
Secure, yes, trustworthy to a random developer looking at your device, no. They're entirely separate concepts.
> Most importantly - it's the user who needs to know whether their system has been tampered with, not apps.
Expecting users to know things does a lot of heavy lifting here.
User being informed means they have to know what a compromised system would entail. That alone is a huge and frankly impossible thing to expect from regular people.
> Most users won't even be bothered to choose and that's fine too, but with remote attestation, it's not the user who decides even if they want to.
> And we don't need random developers looking at our devices to consider them trustworthy, it's none of their business and it's a big mistake to let them.
Then you can't demand those developers trust your device.
The systems used by regular people could just refuse to boot further when detecting a compromise, so I'm not sure where this comes from. We have prior art for that too. This is still orthogonal to letting users who want to patch things patch them, and not letting the apps verify what environment they run in. It's all compatible with each other, and with both regular and power users.
> Then you can't demand those developers trust your device.
Somehow we could for decades. Whether we'll still be able to in the future depends only on how much noise and friction we'll make about it now.
No, they're fundamentally opposed to each other. The entire point is that developers don't want their apps patched by just anyone, especially not malicious actors. Small minority of power users will inevitably get caught in the crossfire.
> Somehow we could for decades. Whether we'll still be able to in the future depends only on how much noise and friction we'll make about it now.
No, you really couldn't. Past lack of technical means doesn't mean anyone trusted your device nor that we had use-cases where this was important. (It was also usually solved with external hardware, physical dongles and whatnot.)
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. The entire point is not to secure the user, it's to secure the apps. It's working against the user's interest, as letting the user lie to apps is essential to user's agency. The technical means used to achieve this could also be used to work for the user and ensure their security without compromising their agency, but that's not what happens on mainstream platforms.
> No, you really couldn't.
Yes, you could. Exactly how you describe, so it was used only where it mattered, and in other cases they just had no choice. Today the friction is so low that even McDonald's app will refuse to work on a device it considers untrustworthy. The user does not benefit from that at all.
You do understand that in this case the user's agency has a very clear line?
Tampering with an electronic identity software is not a fundamental right the same way as tampering with your ID-card or passport isn't.
> [...] and in other cases they just had no choice.
QED. Not that they wouldn't or didn't want to.
> Not that they wouldn't or didn't want to.
Of course, but my devices' purpose isn't to grant wishes to corporations. In the ideal world they would still have no other choice. Unfortunately the more people use platforms that let them attest the execution environment the less leverage we have against them.
So where does a digital ID card fit in your model? It's the government's but on your computer.
Securing apps from the user does not secure the user from malware.
But there were similar things for SafetyNet attestation until it existed.
Your link nicely says "as a general rule you can't use values from recent devices due to them only being allowed with full hardware backed attestation". These attestation workarounds have been rendered increasingly obsolete.