The creator of systemd (Lennart Poettering) has recently created a new company dedicated to bringing hardware attestation to open source software.
What might this entail? A previous blog post could provide some clues:
So, let’s see how I would build a desktop OS. The trust chain matters, from the boot loader all the way to the apps. This means all code that is run must be cryptographically validated before it is run. This is in fact where big distributions currently fail pretty badly. This is a fault of current Linux distributions though, not of SecureBoot in general.
If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.
There are lots of others who are equally concerned about this possibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
I wonder if this would allow an anti-cheat system to get acceptable trust of a system without having to access ring 0.
Of course, we’d then need the OS / kernel images to be signed. I think most gamers run stock kernels anyway.
I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.
Anti-cheats do NOT need to be client-side… Polar is server-sided, yet it has practically killed cheating in Minecraft.
That would actually be the wrong thing to want. In an ideal system trust would always begin by the owner of the hardware, where possible, not the software or vendor they decide to trust.
First the person that bought the system should take the ownership by overwriting the previous owners keys, and from there start signing the vendors key, they decide to put their trust in. Because it is important that the system is trustworthy to the end user/owner first.
Any anti-cheat mechanism relies on not trusting the person that owns the hardware, and why would that be good?
I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.
Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.
No it doesn’t.
When it comes to privacy, politics, and capitalism, almost nothing starts with good intentions.
Most everything starts for the short term benefit of whoever starts it and any investors putting money into it, at the expense of everyone else and ignoring any future negative consequences unless profit can be extracted from them.
It hurting people the starter doesn’t like (even if it will come back to hurt the starter in the long time) is also a very important factor, though secondary to the short term profit one.
Since the user is the one doing the cheating, most likely no, unfortunately.