zlacker

>>pimter+(OP)
This might be where the internet really gets forked, as it's been predicted over and over since the '90s.

On one side, we'll have a "clean", authority-sanctioned "corpweb", where everyone is ID'ed to the wazoo; on the other, a more casual "greynet" galaxy of porn and decentralized communities will likely emerge, once all tinkerers get pushed out of corpnet. It could be an interesting opportunity to reboot a few long-lost dreams.

>>toyg+Za
The problem I have with this web attestation concept generally is that I really want it _inside_ my shiny SSO-everywhere-Zero-Trust-at-the-edge-mTLS-everywhere business network.

I also kind of want it in the public-cloud-meets-private-use home environment (that is, my Cloudflare Access tunnels and MS365 business tenant I use for private stuff).

I don’t want it to touch my personal browsing experience or in any way involved in my personal-use browser environments.

These are effectively opposed desires at this point, and it’s a cat-out-of-the-bag technology.

>>TheNew+Ki
These desires are not mutually opposed!

The fundamental problem with current remote attestation schemes is the corporate-owned attestation key baked in at the factory [0]. This allows the manufacturer to create a known class of attestation keys that correspond to their physical devices, which is what prevents a user from just generating mock attestations when needed.

If manufacturers were prohibited from creating these privileged keys [1], then the uniform-corporate-control attestation fears would mostly vanish, while your use cases would remain.

A business looking to secure employee devices could record the attestation key of each laptop in their fleet. Cloud host auditors could do the same thing to all their hardware. Whereas arbitrary banks couldn't demand that your hardware betray what software you're running, since they'd have no way of tying the attestation key to a known instance of hardware.

(The intuition here is similar to secure boot, and what is required for good user-empowering secure boot versus evil corporate-empowering secure boot. Because they're roughly duals.)

[0] actually it's something like a chained corporate signing key that signs any attestation key generated on the hardware, but same effect.

[1] or if the user could import/export any on-chip attestation keys via a suitable maintenance mode. Exporting would need a significant delay of sitting in maintenance mode to protect against evil maid attacks and the like.