How do you create secure platforms while also giving consumers the keys to their devices?
(FWIW I'm not advocating against right to repair, I actually hope it helps to get rid of black box IoT devices. My device, my keys, etc)
But how many devices really need that level of attestation? Does a tractor need to be able to prove to John Deere that it is a genuine unmolested vehicle, or does it just need to prove to JD that an active subscription is in place for whatever remote service is being used?
If just the latter, then we can still have encryption, no problems. That's just username & password over TLS, same as we have been doing for decades on untrusted endpoints.
With TLS it’s just authing the server, accept any income connections. Support basic authentication.
For home devices don’t require TLS. I don’t run TLS on my home network. I’m remote, I get devices, I accept that risk. TLS is not required for security.
For encryption just design so customers can swap out keys.
The biggest problem is designing cloud in the loop so they can mine data. This needs to stop.
What alternative would you even propose? The only entity with the ability to feasibly fix the bug is defunct and bankrupt, leaving them both judgment proof and with no resources to develop a patch. The only people with the incentive to spend resources fixing it are the people who own the vehicles. So the owners need the ability to repair their vehicles.
Which you can solve by just doing that to begin with, requiring no separate legislation.
I don’t think people should be forced to self-manage software updates on multi-ton machinery.
That's still a third party. Where are they supposed to get parts or source code after the company fails? It could be a car company in Asia with no engineering team in your country. The reason they failed could be a natural disaster that wiped out their facility.
The ability to make repairs has to be in the hands of the public before something happens to them. And it has to be the public and not some government filing cabinet to demonstrate that whatever they provide actually allows it to be done.
A clear example would be that they rotate the signing keys without providing the new ones to anyone else. Third party mechanics would notice this immediately; government bureaucrats may not.
> I don’t think people should be forced to self-manage software updates on multi-ton machinery.
They're not forced to do it any more than they are now. They can have someone else do it for them -- anyone else, in fact.
The problem right now is that the one someone else is trying to keep a monopoly on being able to do it, which creates a single point of failure in the event that anything happens to them.
You could perform phone phreaking in the 1960s, but a million phones in a botnet provides different challenges even if both are technically just a compromised phone.