Challenge to TCPA/Palladium detractors

[John S. Denker]

"AARG!Anonymous" wrote:
> 
> I'd like the Palladium/TCPA critics to offer an alternative proposal
> for achieving the following technical goal:
> 
>   Allow computers separated on the internet to cooperate and share data
>   and computations such that no one can get access to the data outside
>   the limitations and rules imposed by the applications.

That is frightfully underspecified.  Creating such a system
could be very easy or very hard, depending on what range of
policies is to be supported, and depending on what your 
threat model is.

At one extreme I might trust an off-the-shelf PC if it were
booted from CD by trusted parties in a TEMPEST-shielded room
surrounded by armed guards.  At the other extreme, making
tamper-proof hardware to face unlimited threats is very, very
hard -- most likely outside the "PC" price range for the
foreseeable future.
 
> In other words, allow a distributed network application to create a
> "closed world" where it has control over the data and no one can get
> the application to "cheat".  IMO this is clearly the real goal of TCPA
> and Palladium, in technical terms, when stripped of all the emotional
> rhetoric.

Well, the "technical terms" are not and should not be the
sole focus of the current discussion.  There are other
questions such as
 -- what range of policies should be supported
 -- who gets to set the policy
 -- who decides who trusts whom
 -- etc. etc. etc.

I agree that there has been too much ad-hominem sewage
and emotional rhetoric mixed in with the valid arguments
recently.

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