Is this is meaningfully different than the risk to any engineer working in security on ~central infrastructure?

> even if you don't have the keys you may still control the implementation

The sorts of places that care about remote attestation also care about insider risk.

> is this any conceptually different from using PKCS11 provider for TPM in OpenSSL?

PKCS11 doesn't allow you to attest that the key is resident in the PKCS11 provider, which as you say, the author alludes to, but doesn't cover.

> with real TPM, the key could be locked to a specific configuration register value, which makes less sense for VMs.

A vTPM is as real as a physical TPM chip.

The question is which TPM endorsement certificate CAs you are willing to trust.

For some that might the manufacturer of TPM chips, for others it might be their VM provider. (For some, none: for some both!)

Trusting their VM provider isn't so crazy if the VM provider is able to influence the guest code anyway.

> PKCS11 doesn't allow you to attest that the key is resident in the PKCS11 provider, which as you say, the author alludes to, but doesn't cover.

You don’t need that if you include quote in CSR and then CA validates the quote and writes the validation result in the certificate. Certificate then contains proof that private key is in TPM.

I thought you was suggesting a TPM wasn't needed at all, but a TPM is needed to get quotes.

That said, TPM quotes are attesting the value of TPM PCRs which are just registers of hashes (representing the state of the machine).

When making a CSR, you can use https://tpm2-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/man/tpm2_certify... to attest a key is TPM-resident.

I think your central thesis is that at the time of TLS establishment, why not use PKCS11 (with a cert signed by a CA that has validated a TPM certification), and I agree: services should probably integrate via PKCS11.

I just read your original comment "is this any conceptually different from using PKCS11 provider for TPM in OpenSSL?" and yes, I agree it's not conceptually different.

Sorry to have missed that!

Yeah, a typical TPM chip has much lower throughput than OP.

Not suitable for servers, since it's such an easy DoS vector.

TPM is just a spec, it isn't necessarily a black box.

ARM TrustZone, for example, can run this OSS TPM: https://github.com/OP-TEE/optee_ftpm

I expect there are equivalents for Intel/AMD.

> through every scandal, Zuckerberg’s net worth has climbed to nearly $200bn, according to Forbes. Fines mean nothing to those with wealth like his, so the first step to safeguard society is to give Meta a fresh start without Zuckerberg’s influence on future products.

What is the author's model of a company?

It’s The Guardian - they just propose left-wing hyperbolic noise with no connection to the real world rather than offer any kind of solutions. Not even aware that Zuck is the biggest shareholder and has all the voting rights, it’s his baby and he owns it, he doesn’t have to resign to make the world a better place in The Guardian’s favour.

It’s an opinion piece

Read the last paragraph it calls on the shareholders to push back on Mark Zuckerberg. He owns most of the voting rights so its effectively calling on him to push back on himself.

It's an article written by a guest contributor - not an editorial written as the voice of the newspaper

The greater the dependence, the greater the risk.

Does that somehow also explain why many (most?) desktop users survive with just a browser?

To be clear, I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm saying I don't understand.

> decision we have made

This might oversell the agency that practicioners have.

Sandboxed zero-install delivery will outcompete anything with more frictionful installs.

It's probably not the right model for a pacemaker though.

Web/JS has been a double-edged sword for FOSS: sure, I can run a free OS, but if most of my "apps" happen to be JS that I can't practically control, then I have won a battle and lost a war.

I wish Haketilo [1] would have caught on more. There's so many free JavaScript apps but we're mostly just missing a way to actually control which version or derivative of the JavaScript is run.

There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.

[1] https://haketilo.koszko.org/