[Freedombox-discuss] PSN, ARM's Trust Zone and TPM

[Nick M. Daly]

Ben, thank you for your skepticism.  

On Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:53:55 -0400 (EDT), Ben Mendis wrote:
> I am not disputing that the serial numbers exist. I'm wondering how
> viable they are as an attack vector, and thus how much of a threat they
> realistically pose.

Just in case I was missing an entire class of attack, I also asked about
freebirds's letter to the folks who research this sort of thing, the Tor
list.  Seth [0], from the EFF, and proper [1] both produced great
overviews on the state of hardware-assisted tracking.  In short, many
other privacy problems are much easier to track, and some are easier to
avoid by connecting to the Internet via VM.

0: http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2012/msg00157.html

1: http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2012/msg00169.html

> If you're seriously worried about this kind of stuff, then I'm surprised
> you would risk using any kind of computer at all. Ken Thompson wrote a
> very relevant article almost 30 years ago on what it means to trust your
> computer.
> 
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

I hadn't seen that article before, though I've actually seen commercial
Unix-clones built from the ground up because of that specific issue.
Don't recall the name, though.

Thanks for your time,
Nick
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20120628/a559e3f8/attachment.pgp>