Ross's TCPA paper

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Thu Jul 4 01:54:43 EDT 2002


At 12:59 AM 06/27/2002 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
>I fully agree that the TCPA's efforts offer potentially beneficial
>effects. Assuming the TPM has not been compromised, the TPM should
>enable to detect if interested parties have replaced you NIC with the
>rarer, but not unheard of, variant that ships out the contents of your
>operating RAM via DMA and IP padding outside the abilities of your OS to
>detect.

It can?  I thought that DMA was there to let you avoid
bothering the CPU.  The Alternate NIC card would need to have a
CPU of its own to do a good job of this, but that's not hard.

>However, enabling platform security, as much as might be stressed
>otherwise by the stakeholders, has never been the motive behind the
>TCPA. The motive has been DRM. Does this mean that one should ignore the
>benefits that TCPA might bring? Of course not. But it does mean that one
>should carefully weigh the benefits against the risks.

There's also the difficulty that, while it might be good at DRM,
it might or might not be good at letting users write programs
that are good at security.  It's certainly never been a Microsoft specialty.


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