Comment by pona-a

Technologies cannot be normatively evaluated without considering the power structures they facilitate.

Consider secure boot; assuming it's properly implemented, could defend against an entire class of attacks—evil maid: if a third party physically compromises your machine while you're away to install malware, you'd be alerted or stopped from booting the modified image. This is a technical statement. Now whose keys are actually trusted to sign these images? The answer is whatever power dominates in the supply chain: Microsoft, on desktop devices, and the vendor on mobile.

In the case of Microsoft, the public indignation eventually forced them to open this system up, letting the poweruser delegate their agent freely and without manufacturer's coercion. But what about Android, where the natural market forces did get the upper hand: most phones remain locked from disabling secure boot, even fewer let you enroll your own keys. They result is that most Android phones cease security updates only a few years after manufacture, the vendor's own software riddled with obvious faults (like filling a user-inaccessible partition with logs that never get wiped, even after factory reset) and known CVEs, yet nevertheless remain attested as secure for high-assurance applications like banking, as determined by Google. This hypocrisy isn't accidental: the system's real aim was not to secure the user, but to secure its monopoly, instrumented by privileged Google Play Services, harvesting data beyond what any SDK can.

I myself regularly rely on attestation—my phone runs Graphene OS and my laptop self-signs its kernel for secure boot—but I recognize that these technologies in themselves are predisposed to misuse by anti-competitive corporations and repressive regimes.

Imagine government ID backed app signing became the norm for app stores. There will no longer be open-source utilities, like scientific calculators, notes, and budget planners, as they would not bear the certification fee what is effectively volunteer work, instead replaced by their ad-ridden copycats mass-produced in a software sweatshop, featured alongside or, through malicious ads, directing to assorted malware, still just as prominent as before, signed using passport details of random people off the street, taken down as late as they can, because Google enjoys a steady revenue stream from their repeated publisher verifications and AdSense spots. And that's to say nothing of censorship circumvention tools and other politically inexpedient software.