I read the federal government’s Zero-Trust Memo so you don’t have to

This is pretty incredible. These aren't just good practices, they're the fairly bleeding edge best practices.

1. No more SMS and TOTP. FIDO2 tokens only.

2. No more unencrypted network traffic - including DNS, which is such a recent development and they're mandating it. Incredible.

3. Context aware authorization. So not just "can this user access this?" but attestation about device state! That's extremely cutting edge - almost no one does that today.

My hope is that this makes things more accessible. We do all of this today at my company, except where we can't - for example, a lot of our vendors don't offer FIDO2 2FA or webauthn, so we're stuck with TOTP.

I think 3. is very harmful for actual, real-world use of Free Software. If only specific builds of software that are on a vendor-sanctioned allowlist, governed by the signature of a "trusted" party to grant them entry to said list, can meaningfully access networked services, all those who compile their own artifacts (even from completely identical source code) will be excluded from accessing that remote side/service.

Banks and media corporations are doing it today by requiring a vendor-sanctioned Android build/firmware image, attested and allowlisted by Google's SafetyNet (https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...), and it will only get worse from here.

Remote attestation really is killing practical software freedom.

>> 3. Context aware authorization. So not just "can this user access this?" but attestation about device state! That's extremely cutting edge - almost no one does that today.

> I think 3. is very harmful for actual, real-world use of Free Software. If only specific builds of software that are on a vendor-sanctioned allowlist, governed by the signature of a "trusted" party to grant them entry to said list, can meaningfully access networked services, all those who compile their own artifacts (even from completely identical source code) will be excluded from accessing that remote side/service.

Is that really a problem? In practice wouldn't it just mean you can only use employer-provided and certified devices? If they want to provide their employees some Free Software-based client system, that configuration would be on the whitelist.