Comment by akersten
10 days ago
> that bothered to implement hardware-to-app attestation chaining live in production end-user devices
This is why it's important that initiatives like Web Environment Integrity fail. Once the tools are in place, they will always be leveraged by the State.
> and so once they publish all that, I expect we’ll find that they’ve petitioned their attested OS signature chain to the EU as satisfying age requirements for mature gaming.
I hope that Valve pays no mind to this nonsense and continues to allow art to be accessible to anyone.
That ship sailed decades ago when Intel promoted Secure Boot as a defense against malicious modifications; it stops rootkits and it stops cheaters, what more could one ask for, etc. App attestation of this sort has been offered in certain enterprise/government Windows 10 SKUs since day one. Apple’s web attestation protocol has been live on all T2 devices for about as long as T2 has been out.
Governments have real and serious need for verifications that are backed by their force. They’re a government; they are wielding force upon citizens by doing this, knowingly and intentionally. That is a normal and widespread purpose of the State existing at all: to compel people to align with the goals of the State, whether members of the State like it or not, until such time as the State’s goals are changed by whatever means it permits or by its collapse.
If this pans out for them, as cryptographically it will but remains to be how vendors and implementations handle it at scale, then they can introduce voting from your phone — the previously-unattainable holy grail of modern democracy — precisely because it lets the government forcibly stop the cheating that device-to-app/web attestation solves. And they can do so without leaking your identity to election officials if they care to! Just visit a government booth once in a while to have your identity signature renewed (and any prior signatures issued to your identity revoked). That’s how digital wallet passports and ID cards work already today anyways, with their photo/video/NFC processes.
Western sfbay-style tech was founded on the libertarian principle that one should be able to tell the government to fuck off and deny taxation, representation, blah blah etc. in favor of one’s armed enclave that does what it feels like. It’s fine to desire that, but it’s proven too radical to be compatible with the needs of nation-states or the needs they enforce satisfactions for on behalf of their citizens. Attacking attestation won’t solve the problem of the “State”, and has led us to a point where Google can claim truthfully to a “State” that the Android forks ecosystem isn’t competent enough to be trusted, because they can’t be bother to do attestations.
> If this pans out for them, as cryptographically it will but remains to be how vendors and implementations handle it at scale, then they can introduce voting from your phone — the previously-unattainable holy grail of modern democracy — precisely because it lets the government forcibly stop the cheating that device-to-app/web attestation solves. And they can do so without leaking your identity to election officials if they care to! Just visit a government booth once in a while to have your identity signature renewed (and any prior signatures issued to your identity revoked). That’s how digital wallet passports and ID cards work already today anyways, with their photo/video/NFC processes.
we've banned all graphic depictions from the internet, required a verified name attached to every blog post, and made sure to confirm everyone's digital passport before letting them resolve a DNS query, but at least now I can vote from me phone instead of having to go outside. The future is bright!
Yeah, this future sucks, and we’ve had twenty years to push back and utterly failed to do so. I’ve tried for years to interest people in learning about attestation so they can curb it before it swings hard authoritarian, but no one wanted to listen b/c Linux is about having root and anything that challenges that belief is anathema to consider. Welcome to the party, the sky is falling just as it has been for years; someone else can be the harbinger for a while, I’m tired of watching people try the same old arguments that have failed for years.
> the Android forks ecosystem isn’t competent enough to be trusted, because they can’t be bother to do attestations
GrapheneOS has optional attestation, either local (another device) or remote (their server) attestation.
Aha! Graphene, with the support of impacted EU citizens, has grounds to petition the EU for inclusion in their age verification app, then. I hope someone makes that happen! (I am not an EU citizen and so have no ability to help.)