[solatic]

>There's something a bit unsavoury about saying that "only truly official signed apps are allowed to participate in this open network", and it gives a huge amount of power to those responsible for the secure enclave/trusted computing stuff.

Maybe it's a bit naive, but isn't that what federation is supposed to solve? People who are more security-paranoid can forbid clients which don't have the highest security certification, and operators who aren't so diligent will be fine with signed clients being run on untrusted hardware.

I mean... is there any open-source software being developed today which enforces key security in secure hardware enclaves? Verifying the GPG signatures on binary packages is "good-enough" for most operators. Build reproduceability will help to further reduce trust of unverified hardware.

It seems to me the job of the protocol, and baseline/recommended UI/UX, is merely to help users make informed decisions. Security is a spectrum, and if signed clients improve security (while not fraudulently representing itself as perfect or near-perfect security, if it were running on trusted hardware), then that's a net benefit to the open network.

[Arathorn]

I may be missing something, but how do you prove that an app is running a trusted codebase? I know of no PGP clients for instance that sign messages to try to prove that they were sent from a trusted app (as opposed to a trusted user). The only way I know of to do this would be to hook into a trusted execution environment of some flavour like Intel's SGX or Apple's Secure Enclave, to let effectively the chip vendor sign off that you are running an official app installed by official means. You /could/ do this, but you are putting a lot of trust in the secure enclave implementation and those controlling it, and essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. It might also lure users into a false sense of security: just because a user is using an appstore signed copy of an app doesn't mean that app is actually trustworthy or bug free. And it would also artificially discriminate against legitimate apps which aren't part of a trusted execution environment, which seems dangerous - and effectively promoting DRM at the expense of FOSS.

This certainly needs more thought :)