[eyeris]

Believe this is the goal of pushing towards secure compute like Google’s SafetyNet or Windows 11 with tpm.

Feels like there are some more thematic underpinnings as well like security at the cost of user freedom or at the cost of tinker-ability.

[altairprime]

The Windows 11 TPM push parallels macOS and the T2 chip, except years later. Once Win11 is in the majority, I imagine web attestation will start to go live in web banking, because they hate paying for fraud investigations.

But. The silent looming threat I predict that few others seem to see, is that Valve will guaranteed enable TPM w/ secure boot attestation in a future Steam Deck hardware update after everyone bails from Windows 10 to Valve Linux, giving it true standing as a console and overcoming today’s multiplayer lockouts by AAA games (unattested Linux is a godsend for software cheaters compared to Windows), while having captured that market on the pretense of tinkerability with full intentions to betray that unstated assumption in favor of regaining AAA multiplayer support in games.

Similarly, that’s why so many AMD gaming processors already ship with Microsoft’s secure attestation Proton chip from the Xbox inside: if Microsoft wants to end kernel-rootkit anticheat, they have to offer another solution, or else competitive PC multiplayer online gaming dies when Microsoft slams the door on Crowdstrike. Secure attestation, coming to a Steam instance near you. (And not to single out Valve — Epic will go there too!)

Console-grade attestation is coming to computers everywhere, because just as with password theft, it uniformly prevents virtually all software-based cheating. It won’t stop hardware-based cheating, but doi:10.1109/SERE-C.2012.43 and Apple mFI already demonstrated that peripheral attestation can arrive at any time — there just isn’t any point in doing so for Win/Lin gaming when most users aren’t using attestation. Yet.

Sometimes I feel like Chicken Little trying to convey the threat to repurposeability here, but, like, this is what’s coming, because after the Crowdstrike worldwide outage, kernel rootkits are on the way out - and the side effects are going to be devastating. This is why I don’t just say, as one comment below does, “fuck you” to attestation: that approach has no effect and it’s coming for everyone unless more people than I start confronting it and understanding it.