[xinayder]

Can we stop normalizing being surveilled online and on our devices?

Saying something like "the problem is not hardware attestation, but that they don't use ZKP".

You are normalizing the new behavior. You shouldn't. It doesn't matter if they use ZKP or the latest, secure technology for hardware attestation. The issue is hardware attestation. It's the same with age ID. The issue is not that Age ID is prone to data leaks, the problem itself is called Age ID.

[userbinator]

Hell yes. I was going to post the same comment. I don't give a flying fuck how it's implemented. Remote attestation is inherently evil.

I remember the WEI apologists trying to do the same thing to derail the argument. The problem is the goal, not the details. Just say no: DO NOT WANT!

[zx8080]

The biggest problem is banking system. "Don't want - no bank for you". That's the problem.

[Hackbraten]

Let them know. Write a letter to the CEO. And vote with your wallet and switch banks if you can. There's always a bank willing to offer you a non-app 2FA scheme.

[gorgolo]

Banks don’t do this because of profit. They do it because of decades of laws pushing in this direction. Anti-money laundering, know your customer, digitalised currency, abandoning cash, preventing tax evasion etc… it’s been getting more extensive over time.

[Hackbraten]

None of the things you mentioned inherently require the user to own (and babysit) an expensive general-purpose computing device produced by tracking-obsessed adtech giants and with software obsolescence built into the product.

[iso1631]

> vote with your wallet

This does not work. You aren't talking about pissing off a significant percentage of the users who go elsewhere.

The imbalance in power is unthinkable to people 100 years ago when the phrase was first popularised.

[locknitpicker]

> Let them know. Write a letter to the CEO.

I think you're naively presuming the issue is simple and easy to address with a letter.

Regardless of your bank, payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard have blocked transactions involving mainstream online stores such as Steam because they unilaterally deemed some games to be problematic. You cannot fix this problem with an email.

[Hackbraten]

These are two unrelated problems. One is "payment systems use imperfect heuristics in their own operations to fulfil their regulatory obligations." The problem I was referring to is "banks push 2FA onto end users but are unwilling to give them alternatives that don't involve meddling with the user's own most private and expensive device."

The latter is absolutely a thing where customers can (and should IMO) push back hard.

[locknitpicker]

> These are two unrelated problems. One is "payment systems use imperfect heuristics in their own operations to fulfil their regulatory obligations."

No, they are not. You have people reliant on this software infrastructure for very basic aspects of their life such using their own money to buying whatever they feel like buying, and you have people being deprived of their rights because operators of said infrastructure actively prevent and deny their rights to do so. This has nothing to do with heuristics, and everything to do with granting people the power to dictate what you may or may not do with the things you own.

[brabel]

Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously? It helps prevent a lot of fraud. You are opposing something that saves people’s savings every day just because you think it takes “freedom” away from a few hobbyists. Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?

[xinayder]

Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking?

Honestly, if the only way to secure your banking system is by locking down users' devices, there is something really bad going on at your end, security-wise. Your system should be secure even without locking down user hardware.

[Hackbraten]

One of the threat models is that a fraudster tricks a non-technical user into installing malware, which then manipulates the user interface so that next time the user tries to send money to Bob, it actually goes to Mallory. That's a legitimate concern, and one of the causes why PSD2 mandates that all 2FA devices must have a display that shows the user where they're about to send the money and how much.

[ogogmad]

> Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking?

This is a non-sensical remark because it's impossible to "prove" a counterfactual. I find stuff like this incredibly annoying - please don't say this.

[mike_hearn]

Look at the last 30 years of computing history?

When online banking was first created it was an absolute chaos zone. Everyone was accessing it from desktop machines riddled with viruses and malware. There are endless stories of being discovering their life savings had been wired to Belarus by some malware running on their machine that had grabbed their banking credentials when they logged in.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Akrebsonsecurity.com+b...

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/07/how-a-citadel-trojan-dev...

> U.S. prosecutors say Citadel infected more than 11 million computers worldwide, causing financial losses of at least a half billion dollars.

Half a billion dollars, by a single guy with a single virus!

Different parts of the world came up with different solutions for this. The US made all ACH payments reversible and international wires difficult, but that just meant the receiver paid for fraud instead of the person whose machine was full of viruses. This was an obviously bad set of incentives and hacky panic-based fix. Banks elsewhere in the world settled on providing users with authenticator devices that looked like small calculators into which you could type transaction details after plugging in a smart card. Malware could still steal all your financial data but it couldn't initiate transactions.

Obviously, all this was a hack. What was needed was computers that were secure. Apple and the Android ecosystem eventually delivered this, and the calculator devices were retired in favour of smartphones with remote attestation. This was better in literally every way, for 100% of users. Firstly, it protects financial privacy and not just transaction initiation. Secondly, it's a lot more convenient to use a device that's always with you than a dedicated standalone single-use computer. Thirdly, adding remote attestation made no difference because that's what the calculator devices were doing anyway. Fourthly, even in the case of customers of small American banks that weren't capable enough to manage dedicated hardware rollouts, getting rid of fraud instead of pushing liability around allows for lower prices and fewer headaches.

So remote attestation is a non-negotiable requirement for digital banking of any form. When Microsoft didn't deliver most banks preferred to literally manufacture and sell their customers single-use smartcards that remotely attested by you manually copying numbers back and forth between screens. Or they hid the cost of rampant fraud in the price of other services until such a time that Apple/Google saved them.

[Hackbraten]

> Do you think banks are using attestation gratuitously?

What I'm claiming is that banks have the freedom of offering their customers 2FA other than smartphone apps.

> Do you even have a phone that does not support hardware attestation or is all this posturing about something hypothetical?

All the phones I own, including my daily driver, run some flavor of Debian. None of them support hardware attestation.

I'm in Europe, bound by PSD2, and own a couple of cheap, certified chip-and-TAN devices so I can do banking.

[lxgr]

Remote attestation is a technology, not a policy or a political effort, so it can't be inherently evil. You can disagree with all its known or proposed uses, but then I think it makes more sense to name these.

[xinayder]

DRM is a technology and is inherently evil. Web attestation is DRM for the web, and is inherently evil. Age ID is a technology and is inherently evil.

We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad.

It's not like these technologies were created for the greater good and misappropriated by bad actors. They were proposed by bad actors in the first place, they cannot not be inherently good.

[lxgr]

DRM is arguably a specific use of various generic technology ranging from whitebox cryptography to trusted computing.

I don't think remote attestation (or even more so its umbrella technology, trusted computing) is nearly as specifically targeted as DRM.

> We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem. Suddenly, we "need" to create new technology that seem to be security features, but are essentially just being used for evil, thus being inherently bad.

I agree that requiring remote attestation for generic web use is evil. It's way too heavy-handed an approach better reserved

I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself.

[salawat]

>I still don't think this somehow outright disqualifies the technology itself.

A technology squarely and 100% percent intended to give people other than the end user the ability to sleep soundly at night knowing those dastardly end users can't muck with their software (the non-end user) on their (the end user's) devices is only a tool for the authoritarian minded. Sorry mate, but if you're sitting here thinking it's useful and neutral, you are part of the problem, because you're eyes-wide-shutting the fact the only people gaining from the technology are those that already have a terrible trustworthy-ness record in terms of not abusing the sovereignty of another person's machine.

Show me an industry that ships source code, and manuals with all software that runs on the device, along with hardware manuals and the manuals to write your own drivers and doesn't use hardware primitives to enforce their business models over you, then we can talk about an industry where "trusted computing" might be neutral to the end user. History has not seen this relationship bore out, however.

The "Trust" in "Trusted Computing" has only ever been realistically unidirectional in terms of favoring entrenched industry players. As a rule of thumb, if the primary benefactors of a feature are over 90% legal fictions; your feature ain't neutral. It's hostile to humanity. Period.

[fsflover]

> Show me an industry that ships source code, and manuals with all software that runs on the device, along with hardware manuals and the manuals to write your own drivers and doesn't use hardware primitives to enforce their business models over you, then we can talk

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

(And indeed, their Pureboot with Heads and a hardware key allow to restrict which OS can be booted on laptops, while not restricting the user.)

[aboardRat4]

>We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem.

captcha/spambots has been a problem since USENET

[charcircuit]

>We have over 30 years of the world wide web and for these more than 3 decades this was never a problem.

Are you seriously trying to suggest copyright infringement has not been an issue over the last 30 years? Both of them are solutions to problems that we've had over the last 30 years and were created for the greater good to solve problems that developers were facing.

[lisabytes]

Movies, games and music are multi billion dollar industries, in what way have they struggled in a world of endless piracy being possible?

[charcircuit]

Grocery stores are a trillion dollar industry yet you will see stores that close due to theft being possible. The simplest way games and music struggle is losing a sale because people can play them without paying.

[xinayder]

Tell me when DMCA law has worked in favor of small companies/developers?

DMCA is abused every. single. time.

[Mindwipe]

Individual self employed photographers successfully use the DMCA to get significant payouts from large publishers and news organisations every single day.

Like literally hundreds of thousands, every day.

[eesmith]

Remote attestation is a policy, not a technology.

The policy is "I will not let you access this system unless your system software implements this technological protection."

A camera is technology. A security camera is policy, because it's a camera hooked up to policies on how to watch, record, and respond to what is required, and it is a political effort when connected with laws about face masks, prohibiting spray painting of the cameras, and allowing privacy intrusions.

[pigeons]

I think people are too quick to dismiss the possibility that some technologies are just bad and harmful and we can't shrug off responsibility and say I'm just making a neutral technology and the people using it are the ones causing harm.

[paltor]

Different technologies may selectively amplify existing power. If the actions that it enables are disproportionately evil, it may at the very least be considered very useful for evil.

Suppose someone invents a mind-reader that lets the user read the thoughts of anybody else in range. But the mind-reader requires great up-front costs to produce and also allows people with stronger readers to remotely destroy weaker readers, where strength is basically a function of cost.

In a vacuum, the mind-reader is "just a technology". But it aids autocratic surveillance much more than it aids citizens who want to surveill back. It's "neutral" but its impact is decidedly not.

TPMs and remote attestation enable entities with power to enforce their existing power much more effectively. In contrast, a general-purpose computer does the opposite because anybody can run whatever code they want, they can adversarially interoperate with anybody they feel like, and so on.

One of these is more evil than the other, even though they're both "just technologies".

[userbinator]

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

[MadnessASAP]

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.

[userbinator]

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.)

[MadnessASAP]

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.

[xinayder]

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.

[brabel]

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.

[MadnessASAP]

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.

[superloika]

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.

[nullc]

"It’s a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways."

[altairprime]

How should a government act to prohibit misrepresentation of one’s characteristics online, from accessing services for which that government has formally defined regulations based on characteristic into law?

If your answer is “they shouldn’t ever do that”, then you’re promoting an uncompromising position that governments are disinclined to adopt, being the primary user of identity issuance and verification on behalf of their citizens.

If your answer is “they should do that differently”, then you have a discussion about (for example) ZKP or biosigs or etc., such as the thread you’re replying to.

Which of these two paths are you here to discuss? I want to be sure I’ve correctly understood you to be arguing for the former in a thread about the latter.

[lxgr]

You're not necessarily being surveiled just because you're forced to authenticate yourself. It often is the case practically, but it's not inherent, and mixing the two up makes the discussion too imprecise in a technical forum.

Hardware attestation often also has problems of centralization, but that's something else as well.

By just labeling it as an abstract bad thing without seeing nuance, I'm afraid you won't be convincing those in power to pass or block these laws, or those convincing your fellow voters which efforts to support.

[bigyabai]

> It often is the case practically, but it's not inherent

Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel.

Hardware attestation is a surveillance mechanism. If China was enforcing the same rule, you would immediately identify it as a state-driven deanonymization effort. But when the US does it, you backpedal and suggest that it could be implemented safely in a hypothetical alternate reality. Do you want to live in a dystopia?

[lxgr]

> Oh my god. It's 2026, and we're still repeating the "I trust Apple/Google/Microsoft enough to resist the government" spiel.

Who is?

> But when the US does it [...]

I don't live in the US, and while US is often setting global trends, in this case I don't think that's actually that likely, unless it somehow goes significantly better (i.e., the benefits actually vastly exceed the collateral damage to anonymity and resiliency via heterogeneity) than expected.

[xphos]

I think labeling this an abstract problem because all the existing implementations as having concrete but different problems is a little bit of a Motte and Bailey fallacy.

The surveillance of the future will be powered by the things we produce today. If the accepted algorithms leave cookies those cookies will be used tracked and monitized. The bad argument is the forced verification to do things on the internet. Making that start at the hardware is a lock in thats not okay. Business will always own the services and making standards that trade our practical liberty for the sake of security is a very compromised position in my opinion.

And it does start with the age verification, followed by id checks, etc. Its compromising precisely because no lines are drawn and no rights to privacy are codified in law. Without guiderails the worse path will likely be taken for maximum profit

[zx8080]

> You're not necessarily being surveiled just because you're forced to authenticate yourself.

Oh hell you do! Google profit comes from ADS! It's for their profit to surveil and track and deanonymize TO SELL ADS.

[whattheheckheck]

Having thought about ads, what is the ideal feedback info channel loop from manufacturers to consumers? How best to distribute the information of who can manufacture what at what cost/price and what does it do and when is it appropriate for consumers to receive or pull info from where? And if it ends up being a monopoly of 1 centralized system how do you allow for a competitor to break through without ads?

[MSFT_Edging]

Ads don't need to collect user information and form profiles. I don't understand why we must capitulate to more and more invasive advertising.

I don't know about you but I feel humiliated being forced to look at ads all day.

[Y_Y]

Catalogues

[lxgr]

A counterexample is not a valid refutation of the general point. It can be both true that Google will deanonymize you, given the chance, and that anonymous attestation is possible.

[xinayder]

Those in power who need convincing are the same ones pushing for mass surveillance online.

[coppsilgold]

There is a problem where it's becoming increasingly harder to determine which internet packets that are coming to your service are at the behest of a human in the course of normal activities or an automated program.

If all the internet was is static content, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But we live in world where packets coming to your service result in significant state changes to your database (such as user generated content).

I suspect that we are currently in the valley of do-something-about-it on the graph which is why you see all this angst from the big players. Would Google really care if automated programs were so good that they were approximating real humans to such an extent that absolutely no one can tell? I suspect they would not only be happy with such a state of affairs, they would join in.

[userbinator]

That's not a problem at all. It's an artificially created distraction, created to manufacture consent, by those pushing for this shit.