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.

It depends on the level of attestation required. A simple client certificate should suffice for the majority of the non-DoD applications.

It "should" suffice, but entities like banks and media companies are already going beyond this. As the parent points out, many financial and media apps on Android will just simply not work if the OS build is not signed by a manufacturer on Google's list. Build your own Android ROM (or even use a build of one of the popular alternative ROMs) and you lose access to all those apps.

For something like LineageOS, ironically, the solution is to root your device to adjust build properties so it looks signed.

My vanilla LineageOS install fails but I can root with Magisk, enable Zygisk to inject code into Android, edit build properties, add SafetyNet fix and now my device is good to go?

It's crazy to think the workaround is "enable arbitrary code injection" (Zygisk)

Yeah, that's the crazy thing: that this entire "verification" house of cards can be so easily defeated by just faking the response to an API call from code that you can control (after unlocking your bootloader and installing your own code). I guess this is why there is a push to stop allowing bootloaders to be unlocked.

Even locked bootloaders only help a little. Afaik all iOS devices have locked bootloaders but that doesn't stop jailbreaking. I imagine Android, with spotty vendor support track record, would be even easier