Comment by amlib
11 hours ago
I bet soon most of the apps you can only get on a smartphones are gonna require some kind of attestation that is unlikely to be given to your laptop running an "unsanctioned" version of android.
Though it might have some use if you at least can run linux userland inside android, including a whole desktop session, without any performance degradation.
>I bet soon
With this attitude it's almost inevitable. Politics can stop the corporate-OS attestation apocalypse. If it happens, it's on us.
It is difficult to push back agaisnt banks. My bank started charging for some in site transactions and even some help desk. "We are migrating to online banking"
It was trivial for me to choose a couple of different local credit unions instead of any bank. I don't need any app, but their apps both do work on my rooted lineage phones. Their websites work on my firefox with ublock origin on linux.
A long time ago when I was young and not yet thoughtful I had a variety of regular big name banks like Citi and BofA etc.
It was the easiest thing in the world to just choose a different one that works for me.
Opposing remote attestation in full generality is the wrong place to draw the line IMHO. Too many useful capabilities rely on attestation.
For example, would you really want to live in a world in which photographs are no longer considered evidence of anything because any photo might be AI generated? When a citizen standing on his apartment's balcony used his camcorder to record police beating Rodney King in 1991, it started a national movement against police brutality. So, you're OK with a world where there can be no national conversation sparked by any recording because as far as anyone knows, the recording could've been faked by AI? Remote attestation by the camera is the only way I have been able to think of to avoid that world.
For another example, banking and finance started relying on attestation in 1997 with the availability of the IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor and have come to rely heavily on it.
How will remote attestation prove that you were actually standing on the balcony pointing the camera, and not recording some slop you generated? The analog hole is a real problem.
Don't worry, photographs were being faked before Lee Harvey Oswald.
6 replies →