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\chaptertitle{Introduction}
\section{Test}
\section{Centralized Authority}
% ACAB is a anti-authoritarian sentiment
% In anarchist discourse, "cops" are not just policemen and -women, but also other means of centralized control.
% Anarchism rejects centralized authority in favor of the freedom of individuals because it recognizes the dangers
% inherent in centralized authority
% While anarchism is one extreme of the spectrum, the dangers of centralized control are well-established.
% The constitutions of all modern democracies recognize these dangers, and contain elaborate provisions such as a
% separation of powers, and extensive protections for civil society and journalism
% While modern democratic policy rejects anarchism, it embraces it's criticism of power in some vital niches.
% Examples: Whistleblower protection, attorney-client privilege, doctor-patient confidentiality and protections on state
% agents such as judges or politicians
% Centralized authority promises efficiency, but it has a tendency to go awry.
% These sanctuaries carved out from the state's authority in democracies are vital to the functioning of the system
% In today's computing environment, we observe some parallels to this limitation of centralized authority
% In classical computing, centralized control was used abundantly to create order
% Like absolute political authority becomes dangerous when subverted, centralized control in computing becomes dangerous
% when systems are compromised through hacking.
% Allocating control can be done using cryptography
% Cryptography provides near-perfect mathematical solutions to almost any control problem
% However, as anyone who has taken an introductory crypto course knows, encrypting things isn't the hard part. The hard
% part is managing keys.
% computing solutions to these problems include: Air-gapping, separation of concerns, extreme case: HSMs and TEEs
% provide security even during compromise
% interesting parallel to state control / anarchy discourse above:
% they are secure even against the state/police if implemented correctly
% observation: competent hackers are about as competent as competent police
% observation: cannot digitally encode ethics or legal stuff, so no "good guys only" backdoors
% other applications of this principle of distrusting systems are (perfect) forward secrecy
% see signal
% however, system such as TEEs and HSMs are largely a niche solution
% while some are widely deployed, e.g. TEEs for DRM and as secure boot root of trust in phones, desktops
% they are not usually democratic. despite wide deployment authority is with their manufacturer.
% To ordinary users, these capabilities are distant
% EU regulation was necessary to force apple to open up some APIs cf. nfc payment
% normal users are shit out of luck
% Thus, we need new tools. Tools that enable normal people / small orgs to assume control of their data/keys/etc.
% we need to open up the power of TEEs to everybody
% right now, open source is often less secure than closed-source
% trusted boot rarely implemented (right) in open source
% no TEE security at all because of lack of access
% we want to create democratic, open source HSMs
% open source HSMs enable many use cases to the public and small orgs that up to now only large corps or states could do
% email encryption
% secure group messaging
% signing key servers
% secure video / audio calls
% private data storage
% things like that twitter/x protocol for pin-based key recovery
% timestamping / attestation services
% base for distributed consensus protocols
% might have applications in cryptocurrencies when operated as heterogenous cluster
% but beyond that, they enable entirely new use cases.
% conventional hsms limited in computing power, crippled for the purpose of market segmentation
% ours are much more powerful, enable much higher computation crypto such as generic smpc
% generic smpc can do things like key management, pin-based security, secret statistics etc.
% furthermore, above we noted parallel between anarchist distrust of authority and core cryptographic principles
% our hsms not only protect against classical attackers, but also against states
% can be used as democratic check and balance
% example: secure comms that cannot be accessed by the state / police
% example: secure, authenticated photo and video capture
% that's especially relevant in the age of ai
%\section{The Trust Perspective}