>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)
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.
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:
I mean, all tech can be used in different ways. My experience has been much more on the preventing root kits side, rather then vendor lock in.
Yes, there can be exploits, but hardware exploits over a restricted interface (TPM2) are significantly rarer then normal software vulns. Everything is about risk mitigation, there is no perfect security.
Make no mistake. Shoving user-hostile malware down people's throats is the primary use case for this in the consumer space. Bootloader malware is very esoteric right now. Enterprise might have valid use cases beyond screwing people but none of them make sense for a consumer device.
One of the valid use cases on consumer devices is video game anti-cheat software. Theoretically remote attestation can enable them to be less invasive.
SGX does not cryptographically guarantee this. It cryptographically guarantees that the processor contains a legitimate provisioning key signed by Intel. Intel pinky promises that its processor will then only use this provisioning key in certain ways. This promise is essentially unauditable, and previous SGX bugs have shown that Intel isn't really in a position to make it anyway.
Maybe you could do a post on... remote attestation.
That is, the thing that people are actually talking about when they use that term: The means for companies and governments to usurp the ownership of consumer devices.
Being able to come up with compelling use cases for a technology does not redeem that technology from creating a terrible power imbalance that incentives will mean is inevitably abused. Whenever anyone hears "remote attestation", they should think of the already-pervasive Cloudflare CAPTCHA nagwalls, and then think of those becoming something you can only get past by buying a new computer running a proprietary locked-down OS and browser.
The only way to make remote attestation into a neutral technology is to prohibit privileged keys being loaded (and retained) by device manufacturers. This would make it impossible for arbitrary protocol counterparties to know if their attestation requests are being answered by hardware, or merely emulated in software. This approach is the only way to preserve computing freedom (ie the very concept of protocols that mediate between mutually-untrusting parties) in the presence of this technology.
I think consumer devices should have opt-outs for sure. But personally I am much more comfortable with myself and my family having fully locked down apple phones then anything else on the market right now, precisely because of how difficult it is to get persistent malware into that ecosystem.
I get this argument and tell my parents (who know nothing about tech) to get iPhones for this reason but as an economist it is obvious to me the political economy equilibrium implications of this technology are an extreme centralization of power. We are one Covid-like crisis/moral panic away from a regime of only government licensed devices with identity and software integrity attestation can use the internet, and the masses will cheer on the prosecution of the tech nerds who try to circumvent it.
Out of curiosity, do you like ads? I assume you don't.. so how would you react if Apple followed Google and prohibited ad blocking apps + removed that capability from web browsers?
I'd not be able to put up with that, but more importantly, I'd not want to be in the position where I can't even protest anything because there's no alternative to switch to..
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)
> Using a TPM, we can remotely, cryptographically prove a couple of things:
Unless there are exploits..
Yes, there can be exploits, but hardware exploits over a restricted interface (TPM2) are significantly rarer then normal software vulns. Everything is about risk mitigation, there is no perfect security.
One of the valid use cases on consumer devices is video game anti-cheat software. Theoretically remote attestation can enable them to be less invasive.
SGX does not cryptographically guarantee this. It cryptographically guarantees that the processor contains a legitimate provisioning key signed by Intel. Intel pinky promises that its processor will then only use this provisioning key in certain ways. This promise is essentially unauditable, and previous SGX bugs have shown that Intel isn't really in a position to make it anyway.
That is, the thing that people are actually talking about when they use that term: The means for companies and governments to usurp the ownership of consumer devices.
The only way to make remote attestation into a neutral technology is to prohibit privileged keys being loaded (and retained) by device manufacturers. This would make it impossible for arbitrary protocol counterparties to know if their attestation requests are being answered by hardware, or merely emulated in software. This approach is the only way to preserve computing freedom (ie the very concept of protocols that mediate between mutually-untrusting parties) in the presence of this technology.
I'd not be able to put up with that, but more importantly, I'd not want to be in the position where I can't even protest anything because there's no alternative to switch to..