Comment by coppsilgold

> People dislike cash for some strange reason

In my case it is because I would never have the right amount with me, in the right denominations. Google Pay always has this covered.

Also you need to remember to take one more thing with you, and refill it occasionally. As opposed to fuel, you do not know how much you will need when.

It can get lost or destroyed, and is not (usually) replaceable.

I am French, currently in the US. I need to change 100 USD in small denominations, I will need to go to the bank, and they will hopefully do that for me. Or not. Or not without some official paper from someone.

Ah yes, and I am in the US and the Euro is not an accepted currency here. So I need to take my 100 € to a bank and hope I can get 119.39 USD. In the right denominations.

What will I do with the 34.78 USD left when I am back home? I have a chest of money from all over the world. I showed it once to my kids when they were young, told a bit about the world and then forgot about it.

Money also weights quite a lot. And when it does not weights it gets lost or thrown away with some other papers. Except if they are neatly folded in a wallet, which I will forget.

I do not care about being traced when going to the supermarket. If I need to do untraceable stuff I will get money from teh ATM. Ah crap, they will trace me there.

So the only solution is to get my salary in cash, whihc is forbidden in France. Or take some small amounts from time to time. Which I will forget, and I have better things to do.

Cash sucks.

Sure, if we go cashless and terrible things happen (cyberwar, solar flare, software issues) then we are screwed. But either the situation unscrews itself, or we will have much, much, much bigger issues than money -- we will need to go full survival mode, apocalypse movies-style.

> Anonymous-attestation protocols are well known in cryptography, and some are standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Anonymous_Attestation

Which does exactly what I said. Full zero knowledge attestation isn't practical as a single compromised key would give rise to a service that would serve everyone.

  The solution first adopted by the TCG (TPM specification v1.1) required a trusted third-party, namely a privacy certificate authority (privacy CA). Each TPM has an embedded RSA key pair called an Endorsement Key (EK) which the privacy CA is assumed to know. In order to attest the TPM generates a second RSA key pair called an Attestation Identity Key (AIK). It sends the public AIK, signed by EK, to the privacy CA who checks its validity and issues a certificate for the AIK. (For this to work, either a) the privacy CA must know the TPM's public EK a priori, or b) the TPM's manufacturer must have provided an endorsement certificate.) The host/TPM is now able to authenticate itself with respect to the certificate. This approach permits two possibilities to detecting rogue TPMs: firstly the privacy CA should maintain a list of TPMs identified by their EK known to be rogue and reject requests from them, secondly if a privacy CA receives too many requests from a particular TPM it may reject them and blocklist the TPMs EK. The number of permitted requests should be subject to a risk management exercise. This solution is problematic since the privacy CA must take part in every transaction and thus must provide high availability whilst remaining secure. Furthermore, privacy requirements may be violated if the privacy CA and verifier collude. Although the latter issue can probably be resolved using blind signatures, the first remains.

But what's it attesting? Their byline "Every system starts in a verified state and stays trusted over time" should be "Every system starts in a verified state of 8,000 yet-to-be-discovered vulns and stays in that vulnerable state over time". The figure is made up but see for example https://tuxcare.com/blog/the-linux-kernel-cve-flood-continue.... So what you're attesting is that all the bugs are still present, not that the system is actually secure.

It's a privacy consideration. If you desire to juggle multiple private profiles on a single device extreme care needs to be taken to ensure that at most one profile (the one tied to your real identity) has access to either attestation or DRM. Or better yet, have both permanently disabled.

Hardware fingerprinting in general is a difficult thing to protect from - and in an active probing scenario where two apps try to determine if they are on the same device it's all but impossible. But having a tattletale chip in your CPU an API call away doesn't make the problem easier. Especially when it squawks manufacturer traceable serials.

Remote attestation requires collusion with an intermediary at least, DRM such as Widevine has no intermediaries. You expose your HWID (Widevine public key & cert) directly to the license server of which there are many and under the control of various entities (Google does need to authorize them with certificates). And this is done via API, so any app in collusion with any license server can start acquiring traceable smartphone serials.

Using Widevine for this purpose breaks Google's ToS but you would need to catch an app doing it (and also intercept the license server's certificate) and then prove it which may be all but impossible as an app doing it could just have a remote code execution "vulnerability" and request Widevine license requests in a targeted or infrequent fashion. Note that any RCE exploit in any app would also allow this with no privilege escalation.

For most individuals it usually doesn’t matter. It might matter if you have an adversary, e.g. you are a journalist crossing borders, a researcher in a sanctioned country, or an organization trying to avoid cross‑tenant linkage

Remote attestation shifts trust from user-controlled software to manufacturer‑controlled hardware identity.

It's a gun with a serial number. The Fast and Furious scandal of the Obama years was traced and proven with this kind of thing

I assume the use case here is mostly for backend infrastructure rather than consumer devices. You want to verify that a machine has booted a specific signed image before you release secrets like database keys to it. If you can't attest to the boot state remotely, you don't really know if the node is safe to process sensitive data.

At this point these are just English sentences. I am not worried about this threat model at all.