[liberationtech] Hardened servers, new hope for federation?

[carlo von lynX]

Somebody sent me this link.. http://privatecore.com/vcage/
but you don't need to follow the link as I summarize:

vCage is a proprietary Linux-based technology that uses
proprietary Intel hardware features to ensure that only
the owning company can remotely access a cloud server..
any person from a local computing center in whichever
country, armed with screwdriver and bus access tools
doesn't get to see much of anything.

In fact the RAM encryption is pretty stunning technique,
and some other aspects of the thing as well. So this is
great news for any American cloud computing company.

For us instead this technology only reduces the trust
from dozens of computing centers and companies to just
three of them: Intel, privatecore and the web site itself.

When we input our social communications we are expected
to trust these three, and our plain text data to flow
over the Internet in near perfect safety.

Edward has taught us, that everything that is feasible
must be presumed to be being done, thus we should expect
backdoors in Intel's CPUs large enough to allow access
and remote control of these cloud computing devices even
in the face of vCage, allowing an outside attacker that
knows the magic phrase to run searches in decrypted memory
and possibly file systems, all within the elegant built-in
administration website that comes with Intel's AMT.

Thus, no reason to lower the guard and welcome federation
thinking, even if privatecore chose to let us recompile
our own vCage from source. As long as private data is on
a server in the clear, it is out of reach for safety.

So far my opinion. Anything out there to challenge it?


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