> Ultimately, the point of hardware attestation isn't to ensure that your device is trusted, but that the action you're trying to perform was done by a human, not a bot doing millions of them per second. It's just another CAPTCHA mechanism in disguise, required because bots have gotten so good at solving the existing ones.

...no? Maybe this is true of end-user device attestation. But there are other use-cases for attestation.

Server device attestation is an entirely different thing. It's used in e.g. IaaS "Confidential VM" offerings, where the audience for the attestation information is the customer, rather than the server host. It's a very pro-privacy / pro-data-sovereignty feature.

And while embedded device attestation is sometimes about preventing customers from tampering with IoT stuff you "sold" them, more often it's about being able to trust and confidently assert that e.g. the climate sensors you've deployed all over a forest as part of a research project haven't been fucked with to report false data by someone with an agenda. (Or to "apply denial" to your unmanned military satellite downlink station the moment you detect that there's some unknown person out there futzing with it.)