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The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

(gabrielsieben.tech)
733 points gjsman-1000 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.224s | source
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userbinator ◴[] No.32234457[source]
What is to prevent school WiFi from one day requiring a Pluton assertion that your Windows PC hasn’t been tampered with before you can join the network?

Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was.

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aplanas ◴[] No.32235241[source]
Windows security models and policies are the enemy, not remote attestation (RA).

RA is a technology that has its fair use, and can be desired for other systems, like in Linux. With a pure RA system your services can decide to trust or not those devices on your network that can be compromised, and report to other devices that there is something suspicious.

As anything, this can be used properly to increase the security of your edge architecture, or wrongly to limit the users actions.

Let me put another example. With RA I should be able to authorize validated systems in my R&D VPN. If you are using your own laptop with the company certificate, and the verifier tag the systems as "unknown" or "unhealthy", it will not allow the access to the internal network, but sure you can still use your laptop for anything else. This, IMHO, is a fair use of this technology.

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fulafel ◴[] No.32235515[source]
Yes, lots of Linux devices apply it like that today: You can't use your banking app or consume DRM crippled media on your Android phone if you have root or run a open source Android distribution.
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Aeolun ◴[] No.32235557[source]
> if you have root

Because god forbid you have control of your own PC?

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kahnclusions ◴[] No.32236047[source]
I think this is more for Android phones, and preventing a malicious app on your phone from using the root access to hijack data from your banking app.
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1. fulafel ◴[] No.32237449[source]
If this was the reason they'd be blocking access from phones that are not up to date on security updates and are being actively exploited by malware to get root.

But it's the other way around, if you improve your old device by installing a up to date Android on your vendor-abandoned previously vulnerable device, you go from working banking to banned from banking.