How so specifically, compared to say just imaging the devices? Are we really worried about rogue employees putting rootkits on said robots, and to what end?
Remote attestation in general does have positive uses, and would be freedom preserving if the signing keys were controlled by the device's owner. The problem is Intel's design of baking in privileged keys that they themselves control, such that hostile parties can require that you run software that they provably control.
> Are we really worried about rogue employees putting rootkits on said robots, and to what end?
Not about rogue employees, but adversary states, just think of Stuxnet. Messing up a nation's food supply can induce everything from mild unrest to full scale civil war and mass migration. For now (!) we have the lucky advantage that most farm labor is still manual / the machines that exist can either be trivially replaced with older non-smart machines or by manual labor... but imagine 20, 30 years in the future?
Remote attestation in general does have positive uses, and would be freedom preserving if the signing keys were controlled by the device's owner. The problem is Intel's design of baking in privileged keys that they themselves control, such that hostile parties can require that you run software that they provably control.