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I already did, and no, it's not. It has no networking stack. It can only communicate with the outside world through a user-space application, and the user-space application cannot communicate with the PSP without an OS device driver. If either of those components is missing—which, on my Linux desktop, both are—then the PSP is inert.
And that is why their identities get stolen every other week: because they can't be bothered to learn how to secure their computer properly.
(x) Doubt
Rarely does open-source software contain telemetry at all, let alone telemetry that isn't strictly opt-in and honest.
The entire point of telemetry is to exfiltrate data. Even if you trust the OS vendor receiving the data, telemetry is still a gold mine of sensitive information, waiting to be stolen by cybercriminals.
Then you're not talking about the entire problem, only one small part of it.
That's a false assumption, because attestation forces other parts of the stack to not be the same.
Yes it does, because Linux cannot and will not be attested.
It has full access to the OS memory and full control over the CPU. It controls the bootstrapping process and loads UEFI. That means it has access to literally everything, all the time, and nothing would prevent it from accessing the network stack, too. And since it's a binary blob, you can't confirm it doesn't have this capability.
Yeah, imagine talking about the actual topic of the linked article.
You completely misunderstood me. What the attestation runs on is an implementation detail. Yeah, to have it actually secure you need to ensure it's secure from the bottom up to the very top, and nothing has been tampered with - which is impossible with the way open source operating systems work nowadays - but that doesn't mean it's an inherent requirement. You could conceivably create a system for securing open source software too, though it'd still have to be signed and approved by whatever authority decides what is and isn't secure, and the user wouldn't be allowed to tamper with at least some components that are crucial to keep the attestation.
What I meant by all parts of the stack being the same is that if you have any given stack, attestation will improve security. That's not up to debate, that's a fact. Whether it forces some people into options they deem less private, that's a different issue. Obviously a huge one, but it doesn't inherently make anything less safe.
Yes, I know, and that's why I look forward to fully-open RISC-V hardware.
But, as long as the PSP doesn't go poking around the OS on its own initiative and doesn't have its own network stack, it's probably harmless. Probably. I hope. It's the best I could do with what was available to me at the time I purchased this machine, at any rate.
Sure there is: the fact that poking around a non-proprietary operating system's network stack from underneath it is extremely brittle, and will almost certainly cause boot to fail if you so much as recompile the kernel.
Generally, doing that sort of thing in an automated and reliable fashion requires the OS to cooperate. For example, the BIOS can contain arbitrary Windows binaries that will be executed during boot, but this only works because Windows intentionally goes looking for such binaries. Linux, obviously, does not cooperate in such schemes.
The Intel ME firmware avoids this problem because it has its own network stack, and, again, the PSP firmware is not currently known to have one. The PSP firmware isn't exactly wrapped in Denuvo, so I expect someone would have noticed by now if it did have one.
That said, you're right that it is best to use hardware with no IME, PSP, or similar treacherous components. When it comes time to replace this machine, I will definitely have that in mind.
Remote attestation is useless if it isn't secure from top to bottom. Without that, you (or a criminal who has compromised your computer) can easily defeat it with an emulator, virtual machine, DLL injection, or the like. So yes, of course it will check for tampering at every level—I thought that was a given.
In theory, I suppose, but it's a moot point because attestation of stacks based on open-source operating systems is not feasible. Rolling-release and/or always-self-built Linux distributions (like Arch, Debian Sid, and Gentoo), in particular, will be virtually impossible to attest because the binaries are constantly changing.
It's also a moot point because no one will honor the attestation of a Linux-based system. Chase Bank, for example, proudly proclaims that everything other than Windows and macOS is forbidden, and although Linux-on-x86 is currently permitted, less-common platforms like OpenBSD are denied access unless they use a forged
User-Agent. With the machine's entire software configuration being validated, it's safe to assume that, at best, only one or two prominent Linux distributions will be permitted, only those distributions' builds of Chromium will be permitted, and only if the TPM is enabled and driver loaded (which, as you yourself have pointed out, is extremely dangerous).Privacy is safety. Loss of privacy is less safe.