full-disk subversion standards released

[Ben Laurie]

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> writes:
> 
>> The theory that we should build "good and useful" tools capable of monopoly
>> and totalitarianism, but use social mechanisms to prevent them from being
>> used for that purpose, strikes me as naive.
> 
> There's another problem with this theory and that's the practical
> implementation issue.  I've read through... well, at least skimmed through the
> elephantine bulk of the TCG specs, and also read related papers and
> publications and talked to people who've worked with the technology, to see
> how I could use it as a crypto plugin for my software (which already supports
> some pretty diverse stuff, smart cards, HSMs, the VIA Padlock engine, ARM
> security cores, Fortezza cards (I even have my own USG-allocated Fortezza ID
> :-), and in general pretty much anything out there that does crypto in any
> way, shape, or form).  However after detailed study of the TCG specs and
> discussions with users I found that the only thing you can really do with
> this, or at least the bits likely to be implemented and supported and not full
> of bugs and incompatibilities, is DRM.

Apart from the obvious fact that if the TPM is good for DRM then it is 
also good for protecting servers and the data on them, Mark Ryan 
presented a plausible use case that is not DRM: 
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mdr/research/projects/08-tpmFunc/.

I wrote it up briefly here: http://www.links.org/?p=530.

As for John's original point, isn't the world full of such tools (guns, 
TV cameras, telephone networks, jet engines, blah blah)?

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