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The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

(gabrielsieben.tech)
733 points gjsman-1000 | 2 comments | 26 Jul 22 03:46 UTC | HN request time: 1.563s | source
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metadat ◴[26 Jul 22 03:50 UTC] No.32234045[source]▶
Ew. Why are all the chip manufacturers going along with this stupid plan? I want to buy a processor and then own it and have it work in my best interests, not consume electricity and generatie heat enforcing draconian 3rd party DRM policies.
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Analemma_ ◴[26 Jul 22 05:10 UTC] No.32234486[source]▶
The conspiratorial answers here are emotionally satisfying, but ultimately wrong. The reason chip makers and OS vendors are adding this is customer demand, by which I mean enterprises. Companies want remote attestation and guaranteed-immutable OS images on their networks, and I honestly can't say I blame them. In a perfect world they could have it and we could somehow firewall it away from the consumer space entirely, but that's not going to happen.
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walterbell ◴[26 Jul 22 05:21 UTC] No.32234561[source]▶
On-premise, open-source, customer-owned remote attestation servers are possible. Avoid outsourcing integrity verification to 3rd-party clouds.
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wmf ◴[26 Jul 22 05:30 UTC] No.32234629[source]▶
The same enterprises asking for this stuff are also asking for it to be taken out of their hands because they don't trust themselves to operate it securely or reliably.
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pmontra ◴[26 Jul 22 05:49 UTC] No.32234737[source]▶
So this turns into security theater because ultimately they can't trust those third parties too.
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1. uw_rob ◴[26 Jul 22 06:07 UTC] No.32234878[source]▶
When it comes to security someone must always sleep with one eye open - co-owning this responsibility is totally reasonable. Microsoft takes security seriously and is investing heavily in it; if they are already in your orgs trust boundaries I see no reason why they wouldn't be considered good stewards for this as well.

Besides, at enterprise scale, how do you trust internal teams? It could all be security theater and they aren't delivering on their promises as well.

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2. sofixa ◴[26 Jul 22 07:07 UTC] No.32235285[source]▶
> Microsoft takes security seriously and is investing heavily in it

Some parts of it maybe do. Some others, like multiple different Azure teams, don't even think about anything resembling security, or there wouldn't have been multiple critical and trivially exploitable security vulnerabilities on Azure in the last year only. (If you don't know them, please read up on them. Security is hard, but in those cases nobody even pretended to try!)