
\chapterquote{Meredith Whittaker~\cite{greenbergSignalMoreEncrypted2024}}{
    It’s not for lack of ideas or possibilities. It’s that we actually have to start taking seriously the shifts that
    are going to be required to do this thing—to build tech that rejects surveillance and centralized control—whose
    necessity is now obvious to everyone.
}
\chaptertitle{Introduction}

\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}
