MS Patent for DRM OS

[John Young]

Microsoft's patent for a Digital Rights Management
Operating System was awarded yesterday:

  http://cryptome.org/ms-drm-os.htm

Abstract

A digital rights management operating system 
protects rights-managed data, such as downloaded 
content, from access by untrusted programs while 
the data is loaded into memory or on a page file 
as a result of the execution of a trusted application 
that accesses the memory. To protect the 
rights-managed data resident in memory, the 
digital rights management operating system refuses 
to load an untrusted program into memory while the 
trusted application is executing or removes the data 
from memory before loading the untrusted program. 
If the untrusted program executes at the operating 
system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights 
management operating system renounces a trusted 
identity created for it by the computer processor 
when the computer was booted. To protect the 
rights-managed data on the page file, the digital 
rights management operating system prohibits raw 
access to the page file, or erases the data from 
the page file before allowing such access. 
Alternatively, the digital rights management 
operating system can encrypt the rights-managed 
data prior to writing it to the page file. The 
digital rights management operating system also 
limits the functions the user can perform on the 
rights-managed data and the trusted application, 
and can provide a trusted clock used in place of 
the standard computer clock.



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