dangers of TCPA/palladium

[bear]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Adam Back wrote:


>3. hardware assisted compartmentalization -- CPU can run privileged
>software, and RAM can contain information that you can not examine,
>and can not modify.  (Optionally the software source can be published,
>but that is not necessary, and if it's not you won't be able to
>reverse-engineer it as it can be encrypted for the CPU).

This is unacceptable.  If the vendor is so ashamed of his code
that he won't let anyone see it, I do not want it running on my
machine.

>4. sealing -- applications can store data that can only be read by
>that application.  This works based on more hardware -- the software
>state checksums developed in feature 1 are used by hardware to
>generate encryption keys.  The hardware will refuse to generate the
>key unless the same software state is running.

So the "file format prison" of software without backward compatibility
becomes completely absolute.  This is going to kill it in corporate
IT environments.

Offhand, it looks like a computer in this mode is just a sort of
inferior media player.  People will still need real computers.

				Bear




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