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KaiserProtoday at 7:26 AM1 replyview on HN

For a company I work for I needed to ship a machine through unknown channels and have some confidence that it wasn't fiddled with.

my threat model was reasonably technical engineer swapping drives for some reason, or someone claiming that the machine is "different". (no nation state shit)

after the machine was imaged, it would connect to our central config server, get its hostname and exchange keys which would be embedded in the TPM.

once the machine is shipped and booted, it'll check in and sign a challenge. any kind of action on the central API could have a challenge. Each machine is attested at least once an hour.

I'm not sure how "secure" it all is, but it seems to work.


Replies

mjg59today at 8:22 AM

I helped design the attestation framework for https://docs.cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance/docs/4.0/re... - the goal was to ensure that the device you're about to copy a bunch of sensitive information onto is actually the device you were shipped and is running the expected software. This is definitely used in the real world.