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1. matheu+(OP)[view] [source] 2022-07-30 01:18:57
All cryptography is important. Hardware attestation is no exception. The problem is who's using it, who owns the keys, who's exploiting who.

It's totally fine if it's used to empower and protect us, normal people. If we can use this with our own keys to cryptographically prove that our own systems haven't been tampered with, it's not evil, it's amazing technology that empowers us.

What we really don't need is billion dollar corporations using cryptography to enforce their rule over their little extra-legal digital fiefdoms where they own users and sell access to them to other corporations or create artificial scarcity out of infinite bits. Such things should be straight up illegal. I don't care how much money it costs them, they shouldn't be able to do it.

The problem is we have chip makers like Intel and AMD catering to the billion dollar corporation's use case instead of ours. They come up with technology like IME and SGX. They sell us chips that are essentially factory-pwned by mega-corps. My own computer will not obey me if it's not in some copyright owner's interest to do so and I can't override their control due to their own cryptographic roadblocks. Putting up these roadblocks to user freedom should be illegal.

replies(2): >>userbi+Tq >>mike_h+5R
2. userbi+Tq[view] [source] 2022-07-30 07:59:16
>>matheu+(OP)
The problem is who's using it, who owns the keys, who's exploiting who.

The governments know this all too well; that's why they've been trying to ban cryptography, and it was (and I believe still is in many cases) classified as a munition.

3. mike_h+5R[view] [source] 2022-07-30 13:42:09
>>matheu+(OP)
But that's not a good argument because SGX isn't something that empowers the Big Guys over the Little Guys. In fact it's the other way around - they took it out of their consumer chips and now it's only found in their server class chips. So companies can create RA proofs and send them to users, but not the other way around.
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