Cryptogram: Palladium Only for DRM

[Greg Rose]

At 06:45 PM 9/16/2002 +0000, David Wagner wrote:
>[snip...] or for its other features that could be used to
>take away control from the owner of the machine.  A banking application
>is a great example where the user's and the bank's interests are aligned,
>and hence there is no need for physical security or for a semi-coercive
>infrastructure for taking control away from the owner of the machine.

Well, the bank's and the users' interests are only *mostly* aligned. The 
user really wants to be able, in the case of some strange disagreement, to 
take the application to a disassembler and show that it occasionally 
transfers twice as much money as it is supposed to, and show that its own 
records note such transfers. Under Palladium, the user loses the ability to 
audit either the program itself or the program's static data. In theory, 
this doesn't matter, but in practice...

I agree that all of the other protections can be provided by proper 
OS-level security, and don't need Pd. So again, Pd just takes that 
burdensome self-protection ability away from the user.

Greg.



Greg Rose                                       INTERNET: ggr at qualcomm.com
Qualcomm Australia          VOICE:  +61-2-9817 4188   FAX: +61-2-9817 5199
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