It's not asymmetric cryptography itself. It's the fact that it takes enormous resources to manufacture modern SoCs, such that the economy only makes sense if you're churning them out by millions at least. It's also the fact that they can't be modified after they've been manufactured.

It's basically those people who can manufacture chips having technological supremacy over the rest of the humanity.

My introduction to asymmetric cryptography had to do with protecting myself from the authorities while buying drugs on the internet.

One of its first applications anywhere was protecting anti nuclear protestors from government provocateurs.

We could prevent so much fraud of we could only convince the credit card companies to start using it (instead of printing a symmetric secret on the outside of the card).

It's predominantly a force for good. If anything, its a bit anarchical.

What you're noticing is not the leading edge of set of harms brought about by asymmetric cryptography, but rather the late stage of adoption where the bad guys realize that their enemy's sword has had two edges all this time. Every technology that mediates an adversarial relationship goes through this eventually.

With the printing press came temporary freedom followed by intellectual property. So too with radios and the FCC. So too with social media. It's useless to blame the technology. Blame the people.

FFS, cryptography is not the problem. How many times will we have to shut down that particular stupidity? Asymmetric cryptography is a corner stone of basically all online secure communications, and has been since before Google and apple were even founded as companies! (First invented in 1970)

When did Https ever hurt you? That's built on asymmetric cryptography. Wherever you see the word "secure" it's basically shorthand for asymmetric cryptography.

Https

Ssh

Sftp

E2ee

It's asymmetric cryptography all the way.

This is an extreme opinion and is not surprisingly unpopular and downvoted but one must realise that it is exactly how the governments were thinking when they wanted to ban encryption, and how the export restrictions and classification as a munition came about. Now companies are wielding it against us.

Exactly. The weapon is available to all, but only parasites like FAANG can afford to hire the best brains who know how to wield it. As Apple uses it to take a 30% cut of everything on their device, the “democratized” PGP features in mom’s mail client gather dust.

you don't need asymmetric crypto to make remote attest like this.

Google can put a hmac key in each device which it knows and keeps secret. Device can author authenticated messages using it. Of course, only google can verify them-- but it appears that the workflow in this depends on google in any case and if anything that limitation would be more a feature to them than a bug.

I disagree, I think you cast the net way too wide. Asymmetric cryptography enables secure communication in the first place. It's being used nefariously by Google and Apple, of course, but that's to be expected from big tech.