[Cryptography] programable computers inside our computers (was: Hasty PRISM proofing considered harmful)

[Tom Ritter]

On Oct 23, 2013 1:52 PM, "Jerry Leichter" <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:
> Palladium was subject to political attack because it was open about
> what it could do for DRM suppliers.  The new technologies are harder
> to attack this way because the responsibility is diffused, and the good
> and the bad are very thoroughly mixed together.

Reviving an old thread because I particularly like this statement and
agree with it at the moment.

Also, I believe TPM 2.0 includes remote attestation. Clearly this
could be abused, and probably will be, but I'm also interested in
applicability in scenarios where the queryier and attestor are in
cooperation. I'd love to query cryptocat's servers and verify they are
running a particular system build without modification. This might
even be able to provide more improved warrant canary type approaches.
Similarly, in the corporate sector (which includes field agent
activists) verifying that a user's laptop is running the bios and
kernel you expect. This can all raise the bar for attackers.

-tom