Hello guys and gals, it's me Mutahar again! This time we take a look at "Web Environment Integrity", a new mechanism to prove trust on the Internet. While th...
…with Apple and Microsoft, Mutahar’s turn to take a look at “Web Environment Integrity”
While I haven’t seen data to back this up, another Lemmy user called out that Intel chips may have support for running secure code the user cannot modify. The results are signed by an encryption key on the motherboard/CPU that cannot be extracted to fake the signature.
So let’s say Chrome asks this hardware module to hash the executable code and some state for itself currently in RAM and sign it with Intel’s private key on the motherboard/CPU. The “some state” portion ensures the hash is always unique. Maybe it is just a timestamp. Regardless, this helps the attestation server know Chrome has not been modified because the hash is unique and cannot simply be captured in flight once and then replayed/faked over and over like a user-agent string.
While I haven’t seen data to back this up, another Lemmy user called out that Intel chips may have support for running secure code the user cannot modify. The results are signed by an encryption key on the motherboard/CPU that cannot be extracted to fake the signature.
So let’s say Chrome asks this hardware module to hash the executable code and some state for itself currently in RAM and sign it with Intel’s private key on the motherboard/CPU. The “some state” portion ensures the hash is always unique. Maybe it is just a timestamp. Regardless, this helps the attestation server know Chrome has not been modified because the hash is unique and cannot simply be captured in flight once and then replayed/faked over and over like a user-agent string.