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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Then explain why RA was invented? It is inherently against user freedom, just like "secure" boot and the rest of the corporate-authoritarian crap.

People have woken up to the truth as the pieces come together.

This article from 2022 is fun to look at and see how prescient it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106

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I have 2 servers, Alice and Bob, Bob has a secret, I want Bob to be able to share that secret with Alice. However, I want Alice to be able to prove to Bob that it is actually Alice, that it is running the correct AliceOS, and that AliceOS was loaded on bare metal Alice without nefarious pre-book or virtualization hooks.

A TPM with measured boot (SecureBoot) does exactly this, remote attestation is how Alice proves to Bob that it is in a trusted configuration and wasn't tampered with.

As someone who wanted to improve users security, that’s exactly why I find this thread fanatical opposition to attestation baffling. Nearly everyone uses a device that supports hardware attestation. It’s the best available tool to protect users from malware. We do implement a fallback that lowers security but lets the few users who have devices not able to attest properly to continue, but that really lowers security since we can’t even know if the device cryptography is itself compromised and hence can’t really trust anything it sends. If you have a different solution, do share it! I would love to use something you guys don’t find abhorrent! But until then I don’t really see the reason for all this negativity.

Sadly, the problem isn't the TPM or Remote Attestation. It's Google et al choosing to only talk to devices and software they like without concern for what the user wants or trusts. Compounded by everyone else just going along with it.

A TPM where the device owner can't take ownership of the root key is worse then no TPM at all.

If the price to pay for security is freedom, then let users's devices be insecure. With time, they will learn good security hygiene. And if they don't, maybe they don't deserve it.

I would be the safest citizen, free from experiencing crime and violence if I'm imprisoned in my house for life.

That's the academic viewpoint, but in practice it's used for far more hostile purposes.

(One argues that since you own both of them, you should simply set up the two servers yourself with a key of your own choosing, asymmetric or otherwise, and then restrict physical access to them.)

It's not academic, it's a real practical reality.

Alice runs many services and has a rather large attack surface. I don't want Alice to persist those secrets, only to have them briefly at startup (think joining tokens). Bob however has exactly one job, verify that Alice-1 to Alice-N are in a trusted configuration before granting them access to the cluster.

Very recent events in the Linux kernel prove that it isn't safe to assume "0600 root:root" is sufficient to protect secrets from a misbehaving container.

And exactly how many Linux distros support Secure Boot out of the box? Just a few.

I can perhaps agree that the idea of SB can be good, but it was designed (and is used) in a bad way. Just look at how many distros do not support SB.

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