Remote Attestation

We use SPIFFE/SPIRE at work. It works well for our use case, remote embedded workflows that need to phone home. It's very exacting: everything must be exactly right for the attestation to succeed. So it takes extra effort when you commit to that path.

>But what about attacks after boot? That’s your EDR’s problem. Trusted boot provides the bedrock to build a bunch of other primitives on top of. Including cryptographic proof your EDR is installed and running (at boot), immutable filesystems (verified at boot), signed upgrades, confidential computing, etc. Without it you can’t trust your hosts themselves and can’t make further security guarantees. Houses built on sand and all that.

Good take - remote attestation doesn't solve all problems on its own but it is a very powerful tool in the platform security toolbox (and very cool "to boot" :P)

Attestation of any type: A double edged sword, where you are guaranteed to lose freedom. Attestation entrenches, empowers, and enriches other entities that aren't you.

Ironic how this post got upvoted in parallel to polar opposite in the #1 slot: "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838876

Engineers may debate about what-about-isms of vulnerabilities and counterexamples of TPM failures, but that misses the point: We should be debating about where society will be when devices you paid for serve other masters.

Probably we should just write/vibe/demand better software. Otherwise we're going to end up with a law demanding TPMs that watch more than just your firmware...

It's a nice idea, but I wouldn't design any system on the assumption that a TPM needs to stay secure for the system to be safe. There's been so many exploits. We can consider the iphone as an R & D platform for doing blackbox computations. In that nothing is allowed to run that Apple doesn't want. Protecting that is apples bread and butter and they care about it enough to value critical exploits in the millions. Yet people still find them all the time. I feel like if a company that invests millions in the concept can't make it secure then the concept probably isn't that great.

It would be a nice addition if big tech didn't abuse this to shove user-hostile software into devices which the user has paid for (like smartphones).. thanks to this attitude, whenever I see "remote attestation" I associate this with "hostile"..

> Using a TPM, we can remotely, cryptographically prove a couple of things:

Unless there are exploits..

This is the dream of corporate authoritarians everywhere. The dystopian nightmare we all warned about because we saw it coming. "Security" is the "think of the children" fearmongering of the current environment.

As one of our Founding Fathers put it: "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

Remote Attestation: Just Say No.

Waiting for when one can't boot Windows without running snitch software which analyzes everything you do first to ensure you aren't a pedophile then that you aren't a terrorist then that aren't disloyal or un-American.

You won't be able to send email or bank if you aren't running the snitch or any configuration where you could defeat it.

Hell in a boring dystopia run by adults this could theoretically be a good thing! Never miss the next obvious school shooter!

Then look at who actually runs our country.