| ▲ | xinayder 11 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | userbinator 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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! |
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| ▲ | lxgr 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >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 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Movies, games and music are multi billion dollar industries, in what way have they struggled in a world of endless piracy being possible? | |
| ▲ | xinayder 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tell me when DMCA law has worked in favor of small companies/developers? DMCA is abused every. single. time. |
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| ▲ | pigeons 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | userbinator 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | xinayder 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | userbinator 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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.) |
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| ▲ | nullc 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "It’s a poor atom blaster that won’t point both ways." |
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| ▲ | zx8080 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The biggest problem is banking system. "Don't want - no bank for you". That's the problem. | | |
| ▲ | Hackbraten 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | brabel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | Hackbraten an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | altairprime 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | lxgr 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | xphos 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | xinayder 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those in power who need convincing are the same ones pushing for mass surveillance online. |
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| ▲ | coppsilgold 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | userbinator 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not a problem at all. It's an artificially created distraction, created to manufacture consent, by those pushing for this shit. |
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